Conspiracy to Commit Murder? Canadian Newspaper Trades and Closures, 2010-2017
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Newspaper companies in both Eastern and Western Canada have engaged in anti-competitive behaviour since 2010 by exchanging titles, increasingly through trades, and then closing them to create more lucrative local monopolies. This phenomenon reached its height in late 2017 when the country’s two largest chains, Postmedia Network and Torstar Inc., traded 41 mostly Ontario titles and closed almost all of them. The chains claimed there was no collusion involved, but a Competition Bureau investigation reportedly found detailed memos and non-compete agreements. The British Columbia chains Black Press and Glacier Media also engaged in this type of consolidation in the first half of the decade without legal consequence. Including non-daily community newspapers, Black Press and Glacier Media closed or merged twenty-four of the thirty-three titles they exchanged from 2010-2014, or a competitor one of them already owned. While this would appear to be classic anti-competitive behaviour, their dealings went without investigation by the Competition Bureau. This points up the laxity of Canada’s antitrust laws in dealing with newspaper mergers and takeovers.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".