Metro brings its battle for readers to Saskatchewan
The Saskatoon StarPhoenix front on April 2, the day Metro launched.
It’s the Little Newspaper War on the Prairie.
For the first time since the Sifton family merged the Daily Star and the Daily Phoenix into the Saskatoon StarPhoenix in 1928, readers will be able to choose between two local newspapers on Monday when Metro floods the city with 20,000 of its free papers.
Already a mainstay in cities such as Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal, the chain of commuter papers owned by Torstar Corp., The Toronto Star’s parent company, is betting it can win over advertisers and attract upwardly mobile readers who are moving to the province to take advantage of a booming resource-based economy.
In the battle for eyeballs, Metro pushes its papers toward younger readers who want shorter, more sensational news hits. The StarPhoenix, now owned by Postmedia Network Canada Corp., wants to prove once and for all that an army of reporters and a thick daily paper can compete in a world of limited attention spans.
Obscure historical factoid: the last daily newspaper competition in Saskatchewan was in February 1940, when the Regina Daily Star (partially owned by RB Bennett) closed. The Saskatoon Phoenix and Star might well have shared staff well before the 1928 merger.
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