Torstar ponders changes after $24.4M quarterly loss

Torstar Corp. lost $24.4 million, or 30 cents per share, and cut 110 jobs in the first quarter of 2017, as the company’s core traditional revenue streams continued to plummet in line with broad media industry trends.

Digital revenues, where the newspaper company has vested much of its hope for future growth, also took a slight dip.

“Part of why I’m here is I’m excited by the assets,” said new CEO John Boynton, who said one of his short-term goals will be to assess consumer segments and best align Torstar’s properties with them.

“I think the asset collection itself is exciting if we can put it together in a different way,” Boynton said on an investors’ call. “We’re not looking at rounding the edges. We’re looking to do something significant.”

Torstar continued to wind down investment in its most ambitious project in recent years, the oncepromising tablet app Toronto Star Touch, noting that it made a $3.7-million lower net investment in the app during the first quarter.

Launched in the fall of 2015, Star Touch repeatedly failed to meet readership expectations: the company once trumpeted hopes of 200,000 weekly users, instead hitting a ceiling of 60,000.

Boynton, who took over from David Holland in March, made a candid admission when asked about continued take-up of the app, conceding that “the volume doesn’t look like it’s progressing at all.”

The loss, which covers the three months ended March 31, is an improvement over the same period last year, when Torstar fell $53.5 million short. But revenue at the publisher, which owns the Toronto Star, the Hamilton Spectator and Metro commuter papers among others, fell $18.1 million, or 10 per cent year-over-year, to $156.7 million in the quarter. That decline was impacted in particular by print advertising revenue, which fell 19 per cent, and subscriber revenue, which fell 9.5 per cent.

Newspaper publishers throughout the world have seen spending migrate rapidly to online competitors in the ad market.