Canada's Sun Media Corporation announced the elimination of 200 jobs at its newspapers across the nation, including 50 editorial positions.
The cuts are part of an ongoing restructuring "at a time of profound, unprecedented changes in the print media industry driven largely by the digital revolution," the company said in a statement yesterday.
Canada's largest media union, the Communications Workers of America Canada, blasted this third round of layoffs in a year, bringing the total Sun Media jobs cut to more than 1,000.
"Each time we think they have hit rock bottom, they bore down and find a new bottom," CWA Canada Director Martin O'Hanlon said. "Our newsrooms are already like ghost towns and I don't know how the smaller papers will even be able to cover basic local news anymore."
Sun Media is Canada's largest newspaper publisher, operating 36 paid-circulation daily newspapers and six free dailies in nine of Canada's 10 largest urban markets, as well as almost 200 community newspapers, shopping guides and specialty publications.
"The sad part is that these cuts aren't being made because newspapers are losing money - they are making money," O'Hanlon said.
He said the media chain has been diverting funds from its newspapers to its start-up television network Sun TV.
O'Hanlon said that as a result, several Canadian cities have had to "watch their newspapers be slowly cannibalized to keep an ill-conceived and laughably bad TV network alive.
