The Never-ending Story: Postmedia, the Competition Bureau, and Press Ownership in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The 2014 purchase by Canada’s largest newspaper chain of its second-largest chain increased concentration of newspaper ownership considerably. The deal’s 2015 approval by the Competition Bureau, some scholars noted, provoked little outcry over the latest federal regulatory failure to stop the increased concentration level. A series of inquiries, from the 1981 report of the Royal Commission on Newspapers to Senate reports in 1970 and 2006, all identified increased concentration of newspaper ownership as a problem and proposed measures to solve it. Formed in the 1980s, the Competition Bureau took action against a local newspaper monopoly in Vancouver in the early 1990s but has been ineffective since. This study charts the historical progress of newspaper ownership concentration in Canada and calculates that Postmedia now publishes 37.6 percent of Canadian paid daily newspaper circulation and owns fifteen of the twenty-two largest Englishlanguage dailies. That includes 75.4 percent in the three westernmost provinces, where Postmedia owns eight of the nine largest dailies. Possible explanations for a lack of outcry include the company’s use of the “death of newspapers” meme as justification and the fact the deal’s effect was felt mostly in Western Canada, far from the corridors of power.
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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 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".