Toronto Star publisher Cruickshank to step down

Toronto Star publisher John Cruickshank, who played an important role in launching the paper’s Star Touch tablet app, has announced plans to step down in May.

In an interview, Cruickshank said he decided it was time to move onto something new and pass on the publisher role to someone who is “not a digital visitor but a digital native.” David Holland, president and chief executive of the Toronto Star’s parent company Torstar Corp., will act as interim publisher.

“It seemed like the right t i me f or r egeneration,” Cruickshank said. “I’ve had a really good run.”

Cruickshank, 62, has been the publisher of the Toronto Star since 2009, following a series of senior roles at other media organizations including the CBC, the Globe and Mail and the Chicago SunTimes.

His tenure at the Star has been a challenging one, with Torstar’s stock price losing more than 80 per cent of its value as the newspaper industry struggled with the loss of print readers and the advertising dollars that come with them.

To combat those forces, the Toronto Star made an ambitious bet on t ablet readers under Cruickshank, hiring more than 100 temporary and full- time staff and spending $ 14 million to develop and market its Star Touch app in 2015, expecting to spend an additional $ 10 million in 2016, according to its fourth- quarter earnings report.

Star Touch has been downloaded more t han 200,000 t i mes s i nce it launched in September, but only has 26,000 daily users, which the company said was “lower than we initially anticipated” in a March 2 release.

In January, the Toronto Star announced it was cutting hundreds of jobs and implementing a voluntary buyout program as it outsourced its printing operations and circulation. The cuts included 10 tablet-team and three digital desk jobs, all but one of which were temporary contracts.

Still, Cruickshank said he was optimistic about the future for Star Touch. He said people who use the app tend to open it more often and spend longer with it as time goes by.

“We never thought the tablet would be the platform of the future. We just thought it would be one of the platforms that would take us into the future,” he said. “And we still believe that.”

Asked if there is anything he would have done differently, Cruickshank declined to give a specific example, but said the most challenging part of the job was adapting to the rapidly changing business model. He said he is most proud of investments he made to the paper’s investigative team: “I think they really paid off in value for the community,” he said.