What I want to see before investing (#2) 2. Leadership Plan
Who is running this s***show? The recently appointed president doesn't seem to actually be a working president. Kirk MacDonald is the same semi-retired American gentleman who put in time with this group since spending a year with the Toronto Star, is on record declaring Brian Kalish a genius, and he's likely the same guy who encouraged Kalish to think there was an automatic money-printing machine hidden somewhere on the Interwebs, if you could just find it.
MacDonald doesn't seem to want the job -- he doesn't seem to even want to acknowledge the existence of NOW Toronto, where he's based -- and he's certainly not the guy to pick up the rate cards and start spending long hours working the phones trying to actually bring some dough into this failed enterprise. Can he inspire others to do the job? Uh.
Mac Daddy made his mark several decades back in Denver at the daily rag. The alt-weekly in Denver is "Westword," which has done okay by selling numerous back-of-paper ads to the hundreds of retail cannabis stores in the city. If Media Half-a-Cent-ral had anyone in charge, they would build a strategy to start bringing in ad revenue from Toronto and Vancouver's burgeoning retail cannabis stores (compliant with local regulations, of course.)
How many ads in this category have NOW and Georgia Straight run in 2020? Er, basically none.
And then there's Larry "Go" Bleau who used to publish "I Gotta Go" magazine until Covid came along. His sales model is: You give me money and I'll print your ad and then I'll get a freelance writer to type up a flattering article about you. This has been a semi-viable model for bottom-feeder throwaway publications, but someone still needs to make the effort and do the work of revenue generation. Who will that be? The president? The CEO? What exactly is it that these two figureheads are supposed to provide?