Globe and Mail will stop delivery to many BC communities

VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – The ever-changing media landscape has shifted once again, and this time it’s customers who are feeling the effects. The Globe and Mail has announced it will stop delivery in several communities in BC and Newfoundland and Labrador.

About 3,000 customers are affected, with about a third of them located in communities in this province.

“Typically they are the most distant communities,” explains Globe and Mail publisher Phillip Crawley. “We are talking about the journeys that take us a long time by road to get there.”

Whistler is among the communities that will see delivery of the national newspaper cease on October 1st. Prince George is also on the list, along with many smaller communities in the BC Interior and up north.

“Prince Rupert, Blind Bay, Sun Peaks, Logan Lake, Revelstoke, 100 Mile House and the surrounding areas around those [communities],” lists Crawley.

The publisher says the changes in BC will save the company about $500,000 annually. Including Newfoundland and Labrador, the savings are $1.5 million each year.

“These are routes we’ve found to be highly unprofitable, based on the volume of sales we have in these areas,” he says.

“It’s obviously always a challenge when you are a national newspaper to reach all parts of the country in a timely fashion.”

In BC, Crawley says the paper uses a variety of methods to deliver its product, including barges to get the Globe and Mail from the presses in Vancouver to customers on Vancouver Island.

“Sometimes we have to fly,” he adds.

“Some of the transport journeys, particularly in the winter, are very long and difficult.  We’re talking about four and five-hour drives for the trucks and obviously in some of those areas the number of sales is pretty small.”

Crawley offers an apology to those customers who will be losing deliver service but wants them to know they will be offered access to the Globe and Mail’s digital content. He points out that many already have access to the paper’s online version because “if they had been a six-day print subscriber, they were getting the digital subscription for free.”

“So what we’re doing is we’re saying we’ve got various choices we can give you from a digital point-of-view,” says Crawley

Options include the Globe Unlimited service, which was launched, behind a paywall, last fall; and Globe2Go, which is a .pdf version of the newspaper.

“You see every page on your screen as it appears in the paper,” explains Crawley. “You can read the paper as if you were sitting with a printed version in your hand.”

The move being made by the newspaper does not affect any jobs, nor does it mean the Globe and Mail will reduce its coverage of news and issues in BC.

“In fact, we have plans for expansion of what we do in BC, for the coming year starting in January” says Crawley.