- Quebec's La Presse was founded in 1884. After 133 years, in 2017, it stopped publishing a print paper.
- It now operates as a non-profit, boasting a tablet app called La Presse+, 200 journalists, and an average of nearly four million monthly readers.
- La Presse relies on ad revenue and generous government tax credits.
The news media in Canada is in crisis. Policy responses to date are failing to solve for the information that citizens need to make informed decisions about important issues and debates. The Future of News series brings together leading practitioners, scholars, and thinkers to imagine new business models, policy responses, and journalistic content that can support a dynamic future for news in Canada.
La Presse has served news to Quebecers since 1884, but anyone hoping to purchase a physical paper today is out of luck. The publication finished transitioning to digital-only in 2017, part of a massive restructuring necessary to try to ensure its modern survival in its homogenous French-speaking province.
“It’s been an institution across Quebec,” says Patrick White, a journalism professor at the University of Quebec in Montreal. “They were the first publication in Quebec to move to a digital-only platform, and now they’re reaping the benefits. In two or three years, I’m not sure we’re going to have print editions of newspapers in Quebec. The end is in sight.”
Just one year later, in 2018, La Presse became a non-profit, another prophetic decision other Canadian publications have since mimicked. The move allowed La Presse to solicit more philanthropic and government aid while ditching a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders. Subsequently, La Presse became one of the first publications in Canada to qualify for registered journalism organization status, allowing it to issue charitable tax receipts to donors beginning in 2020.
“The [move to non-profit] was essential to diversify our revenue streams and ensure our sustainability,” La Presse’s vice president of communications and philanthropy Florence Turpault-Desroches tells The Hub. “It was the culmination of a major transformation of our products and practices [over the course of a decade].”
La Presse now boasts an average of nearly four million monthly readers and a $40 million reserve fund. Most notably, its 2023 annual report claimed rising ad revenues. Turpault-Desroches says about 75 percent of La Presse’s income comes from advertising, a statistic similar to what old print newspapers drew from ads. How is that possible at a time when most digital advertising is about as profitable as scrounging through couch cushions? As you likely didn’t guess, it’s largely thanks to a tablet app.
Loading the digital paper
La Presse+, which is available on Apple and Android tablets, is a free app with a sleek layout.
“Every day, 240,000 readers open the app,” Turpault-Desroches says. “The vast majority of our advertising revenue comes from our app.”
Turpault-Desroches credits its success to “engaging, interactive, and playful” ads. But while La Presse+ is well-designed, the fact that those ads can’t be batted away with ad blockers like on the web would seem a likelier cause.
“The [video ads] on La Presse+, they can’t be skipped. It brings millions in revenue each year,” White says.
That revenue pays for La Presse’s newsroom while keeping its work free to readers.
Compared to other modern media, La Presse has been on a bit of a hiring spree. White notes that it recently took on nine new journalists to expand its regional coverage across Quebec, and even began operating a small Washington bureau to cover the American election.
“They have a newsroom with over 200 journalists, that’s a luxury these days,” White says. “They’re reaping the benefits of investing in the tablet-first model. The average readership time on weekends is 50 minutes. That’s what advertisers want to hear.”
But a $40 million iPad app is not a cure-all for what ails Canadian media. In 2015, two years after La Presse+ launched, the Toronto Star debuted Star Touch, a copycat app that employed La Presse’s platform and technical expertise. Two years later, Star Touch was dead, 30 employees were axed, and the Star’s own $40 million investment was aflame. Less than 60,000 of the Star’s two million readers used the app weekly.
“It appears [La Presse] won’t be able to sell the template to other news organisations,” says White. “La Presse’s dream was to sell [their app model] worldwide. That didn’t work out.”
Turpault-Desroches says La Presse “made the transition [to the tablet app] very gradually so that our readers could adjust, and then we completely abandoned print, which the Toronto Star did not wish to do.”
In 2016, Toronto journalist David Topping argued the Star should have started small with Star Touch, rather than investing millions and reorganising its entire newsroom before readers had even seen the product. Ironically, the Star’s publisher blamed the Touch layoffs on “uncertainty about what was needed in the marketplace.”
Regardless of the cause, that Star Touch flopped while La Presse+ thrives speaks to the urgency with which La Presse targeted readers and the unique Canadian market in which it operates. There are many ways to get English-language news about Ontario across Canada; there are increasingly few ways to get French-language news about Quebec. La Presse remains one of the most prominent ways.
La Belle Province: a unique market
While no modern media landscape could be accused of thriving, White paints a picture of a province of Quebec profitable for regional powerhouses with forward-thinking strategies, but brutal to indies, upstarts, and generic national brands.
“With layoffs at Bell Media Quebec, Quebecor, and CTV News Montreal, last year was terrible,” White says. “Metro went bankrupt in summer 2023; that meant the loss of 17 weeklies and 75 journalist positions across Quebec. This year is much better. Advertising revenues are steady, and big players like La Devoir and La Presse are profitable.”
That rosiness is relative. White says Quebec is still a “tough news environment,” and that 2024 may be especially rough for Les Coops de l’information, which publishes Ottawa-Gatineau’s Le Droit, Sherbrooke’s La Tribune, and four other regional papers that once lived alongside La Presse under the Power Corporation umbrella.
Power Corp. is owned by the powerful Desmarais family, which has long had business and family ties to politicians like former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, Brian Mulroney, and Jean Chrétien, and is a strong federalist voice in Quebec. La Presse was owned by the Desmaraises for more than 50 years. The family gifted La Presse $50 million as part of its transition to non-profit status.
“The issue with the Quebec market is that it’s small,” White says. “It’s under nine million people. It’s very difficult to launch a news organisation and make it profitable.”
Quebec’s French-language market is isolated within Canada. While that means less outside competition from Anglos, it also means less room to grow. Storied publications attract supplementary philanthropic revenue. Newcomers likely won’t.
“La Devoir’s profits are mainly related to tax credits, you don’t want that as a business model,” White says. “So the non-profit model has been a game-changer. People are starting to realize that if you invest in news it becomes a public service. Nonprofits can reinvest the money they make back into the organisation.”
In White’s view, La Presse’s non-profit model is almost essential. “If you have a good mix of crowdfunding, philanthropy, advertising revenue, if you host events, if you’re inventive with newsletters, podcasts, and videos, I think that’s a formula for success. But it’s not a business for profits,” he admits.
Quebecois news media enjoys generous tax credits—the federal government offers a credit for 35 percent of a journalist’s salary (up to $29,750), which Quebec’s provincial government matches up to $26,250. When factoring other federal initiatives supporting the sector, Quebec media outlets could conceivably cover upwards of 90 percent of their journalists’ payroll costs.
While Turpault-Desroches notes these “standardised tax credit programs are available to the entire industry,” they can be fickle. White believes La Presse’s advertising income puts it in a better position to absorb a potential end to these credits under future governments than most publications. But he warns there are still risks to their ad-first model.
“They organize events for donors, online panels, discussions relevant to Quebec readers. They’re against paywalls, they’ll never have one. But they’re going to have to diversify, maybe make a bigger venture into TikTok and Snapchat to monetize more content.”
Regardless of which politician occupies 24 Sussex Drive over the next decade, generations will shift and their news-consumption habits will shift with them. With that inevitable change in mind, La Presse is already working to onboard, and advertise to, the next generation of readers.
The kids these days—and their data
Gen Z overwhelmingly prefers mobile news platforms, and better mobile engagement is on La Presse’s 2024 agenda. White says La Presse “did really well on its website’s mobile optimization, and with [its mobile app]. The revenue is bigger on La Presse+, but they’re getting good traffic on mobile. Reaching the new generation with diversified content will be a challenge in the next few years.”
But La Presse has already taken the first steps to meet it.
“They have started to hire younger journalists, that’s a shift,” White says. “They’re broadening their horizons as well. They’re [no longer] just hiring French Canadians from Quebec City and Montreal. But they’re going to need to double down on video content to reach the new generation.”
Data will also be crucial to La Presse’s future. Given Gen Z’s blasé attitude towards data privacy, any young readers who can be drawn to the publication could be ripe for targeted advertising. La Presse doesn’t sell its user data, and claims to “adhere to the strictest rules regarding data collection and usage,” but frequent readers must make a free account so their data will be offered to La Presse’s databases.
“We have what we call an ‘authentication reader wall,’” La Presse’s Turpault-Desroches says. “Creating reader accounts helps us recognize readers, personalise advertising, and personalise our relationship with our donors. The reader wall allows us to obtain data, and to better know our audience.”
Gen Z appears more likely to read news and tolerate its ads if they’re personalised, so a free publication with data-driven layouts and ads targeting user interests could be the future of news consumption for a generation unaccustomed to paying for it.
“Today, 45 percent of our advertising revenue is generated by data-related ads,” Turpault-Desroches says. “Four years ago, it was 0 percent.”
La Presse continues to obsessively study how, where, and when its readers approach the news. La Presse+ has been available to Apple desktop and laptop users since last fall, in the publication’s latest attempt to capture more non-tablet readers. Mobile will be the next frontier.
In a way, La Presse has recreated the ad-driven revenue model of its print predecessor. However, instead of each reader paying for a subscription, donors, philanthropists, and tax credits collectively cover what advertising cannot. White believes the Quebec market is “too unique” for the rest of Canada to simply copy its approach, but in Quebec, “a nation within a nation”, La Presse, “a market within a market,” could thrive by exchanging knowledge for data.
The Future of News series is supported by readers like you and Meta.
