What it will take to drive a sustainable value increase I was recently asked what it would take beyond a buyout from Fairfax or another benevolent purchaser to get Torstar into the $5.50 range. Beyond VerticalScope becoming the next Google which is unlikely, the key lies in getting a detente with PostMedia. The race to the bottom with rates for advertising and flyer distribution defies logic. Do a map of where they compete and get some insights into rates in those markets and the conclusions will be obvious. They are both operating at below cost rates because they are too stubborn, stupid or incompetent to take the necessary steps to rationalize markets for the benefit of both struggling organizations.
The Competiton Bureau isn't going to intervene because of the state of these media companies and while clients may not be happy they have to know they've been living in fools paradise for too long. Tens of millions in earnings have been squandered because of the shortsighted directives of Torstar and PostMedia management.
If Boynton rolls out a Back to the Future strategy of building paywalls around all of their websites I hope the Voting Trust picks up torches and burns the place to the ground. It was an abject failure in the past and all of the accounting chicanery in the world isn't going to make it work. Moving diminishing earned print revenues over to digital by allocation slights of hand should fool no one paying attention (assuming they all aren't complicit in the fraud).
StarTouch should still be in their recent memories with the millions wasted. If they could have found a way to bury that debacle without a trace you can be sure they would have. They have run out of places to hide their incompetence which should make their new strategies far more transparent. Sure the spreadsheets look good and the new turnaround team will deliver them with greater intellectual certainty, but it remains smoke and mirrors. No one is going to pay to subscribe to the banal content produced by Torstar. This is not The New York Times and time to deal with reality as it is, not as you'd wish it was.