La Tribune union relieved but alert following emergency funding announcement

On Monday the provincial government announced $5 million in interim financing for the Groupe Capitales Medias (GCM), the French-language media company that owns six of Quebec’s regional newspapers including La Tribune and la Voix de L’est, and which filed earlier that day for creditor protection. Speaking about the announcement on Tuesday morning, Alain Goupil, veteran journalist with La Tribune and president of that paper’s union kept his tone cautious in telling The Record that the news came as a relief.

“What we have to realize is that this

is a temporary help,” Goupil said, expressing that in the long term GCM’S troubles are a symptom of a larger problem coming from the fact that information giants like Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple are getting the vast majority of online advertising income. Without focused support from governments, the business community, and the population at large to support local media, he added, the issue will just come back again.

In that light, the union president said that he was reassured by the fact that he provincial government is responding but also pointed out that the emergency interim fund sets the GCM papers on a new path that includes a lot of uncertainty. Asked about whether the news that their parent company had filed for creditor protection came as a surprise to the paper’s staff, Goupil shared that while people knew that GCM was in bad financial shape, no one was aware of how dire the situation would actually prove to be.

“We thought we would be able to get to the end of the year,” Goupil said, explaining that the hope was to draw on support from the federal budget that will only come into effect next year.

Despite the past and present uncertainty, however, the union president expressed faith that the community will show its support for the local paper.

“An institution like La Tribune cannot disappear just like that,” he said.

When the public conversation around the financial situation of GCM got started last week, Quebecor media began to report that that company was in talks to acquire its struggling competitor. Asked if he had concerns about that possibility, Goupil shared the view that Quebecor’s rough history with unions doesn’t make them an ideal choice, although ultimately he put the survival of the paper first.

“If that is the only scenario that allows for the survival of the regional media, then we will look at it,” he said, “but I think we have to look at all other possibilities as well.”