Toronto Star to shutter Star Touch app, cut 30 jobs
TORONTO The Toronto Star has announced that its tablet app Star Touch, which it hailed as a revolutionary way for readers to get their news when it was launched less than two years ago, will cease to exist on Aug. 1.
The newspaper said it would lay off 29 full-time employees and one part-time employee. Among those affected are 17 unionized content editors, production editors and designers.
“It’s a brutal day,” said Jim Rankin, a Toronto Star journalist who spoke Monday in his capacity as chair of the Toronto Star unit at Unifor 87-M.
In 2015, Canada’s largest circulation newspaper took a bold step into what it thought would be the future of written journalism, launching the app, “packed with videos, photographs and interactive graphics,” using software it bought from the Montreal newspaper La Presse.
Torstar poured $11 million into the launch in its first year, and hired 70 people to produce the product.
Weeks after the launch, Michael Cooke, the Star’s editor, waxed effusive on a local radio show, proclaiming that Star Touch was “doing for news what Cirque du Soleil has done for circus.”
But Star Touch failed to catch on, and on Monday, the Star folded the Star Touch tent. In a memo to the newsroom, John Boynton, chief executive of Torstar, announced that Star Touch would be replaced on Aug. 1 by a “new universal app that operates on both smartphones and tablets.”
“While Toronto Star Touch is an editorial success and has developed a loyal audience since its launch in 2015, the overall numbers of readers and advertising volumes are significantly lower than what the company had forecast and than what are required to make it a commercial success,” Boynton said in the memo.
Rankin said: “The union is saddened by the decision to close what editorially was a really successful product. We are saddened for the remaining Star Touch employees. We hope that whatever we continue to do digitally might result in some opportunities for our members.”
Torstar had aimed to have 180,000 readers for Star Touch by the end of 2016. The product earned good early reviews: Apple in 2015 named Star Touch as the best new news app of the year.
“We thought we had a great product but we were disappointed with the number of people who downloaded the app,” said Bob Hepburn, a spokesman for the Star.
He said the Star spent about $23 million on Star Touch.