Montreal bloggers have not yet been able to fill the void left by the decline of local weekly alternative newspapers. Recently, Quebecor Inc.’s Sun Media division closed The Montreal Mirror, a beloved alternative Anglo (that’s English language to you and I) newspaper. Just two months earlier, a similar alternative weekly publication called The Hour / Hour Community was cancelled.
Sex Column & Rant Line Gone
With a focus on Montreal, The Montreal Mirror covered a diverse range of topics including, politics, and art and food reviews. It also had several columns providing more personalized narratives of Montreal news, as well as the popular Dear Sasha sex colum and of course, the hilarious quotes from the long-running rant line.
A google search of “Montreal Blog” reveals a number of interesting results. The first hit is a tourism blog. Understandable if Montreal were colonial Williamsburg, this underscores the dearth of vibrant online alternative to the weekly newspapers.
Can Blogs Replicate Their Success
On the first page of google results, ForgetTheBox.ca is the most comprehensive blog, covering Montreal’s political and arts news. Unimpressively though, the website contained much dated material. The “Pretty Words and Things” section, which publishes prose, poetry and art-photography, had not been updated in almost a year. The second google search result was MontrealPoutine.ca. Although it presents itself as a general Montreal blog, in only provides serious coverage of local music acts. Out of the five articles on the homepage, only one article had a comment.
Print Newspapers are Folding
The first and most obvious hurdle for such blogs, is finding the funds to support a full time staff. Given that print newspapers are slowly folding, it is difficult to imagine optimistic venture capitalists searching for the next big blog. Thus, they must rely on advertising for profits. Based on the small number of comments on any of the articles, attracting advertisers must be difficult.
Future Success
The future and continued success of news-related publications will require quality and relevant content, as well as using current Internet-based platforms to spread that content. Therefore, to attract a larger audience, these blogs should seek out novel ways to integrate Facebook events to both find out about and publicize interesting happenings around Montreal. This could make any blog an important news source for local Montrealers, which would enable the blog to raise capital and cover more diverse topics.
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