The start-up of a third daily newspaper in Canada’s third-largest city provides a case study in the economic problems faced by new dailies. Publication of the Vancouver Times commenced in September, 1964 after capital was raised through a public share offering. Circulation was solid at 40,000, but advertising was scarce as major businesses ignored the Times. By March, the paper could not meet its payroll. A  public plea  for financial support sold enough new shares to cover expenses, but by May the Times balance sheet was in crisis again. A plan to convert to weekly publication was shelved after a ‘palace revolt’ of staff ousted the founding publisher and shareholders contributed more capital. Daily publication continued until August, when the newspaper folded.

 
Introduction

Four daily newspapers were published in Vancouver, British Columbia, until the Star and News folded during the Depression of the1930s and their staffs formed a co-operative that started a morning newspaper they called the News-Herald. Its morning circulation of 30,000 was dwarfed by those of the evening Vancouver Sun, owned by Robert Cromie, and the Daily Province, owned by Canada’s largest newspaper chain, Toronto-based Southam Press. The Province was the city’s largest daily, circulating about 125,000 copies by 1945 compared with about 100,000 sold by the Sun, as an agreement between Cromie and Southam stabilized the relative size of the evening newspapers. A violent 1946 strike by International Typographical Union printers at the Province reversed the relative positions of the newspapers, however. The Sun, published by Don Cromie following his father’s death in 1936, pulled ahead in circulation as the Province was hindered by a labor boycott after it resumed publication using non-union printers. A circulation war ensued for more than a decade until a truce was negotiated in 1957 with an agreement to amalgamate production. Southam paid the Cromie heirs $3.85 million for an agreement to divide profits equally through a holding company they called Pacific Press. The new firm bought the morning News-Herald, which had come into ownership of the Thomson chain, and folded it while the Province moved to morning publication. An inquiry by the federal Restrictive Trade Practices Commission allowed the amalgamation, with some conditions, in 1960. It found the combination was an illegal merger under law, but accepted Southam’s argument that the arrangement was an “economic necessity” to ensure the continued publication of the Province and thus two daily newspapers in Vancouver.
 
As if to contradict that argument, the new joint monopoly created some demand for a third daily in competition with the Pacific Press papers, and an advertising executive named William “Val” Warren was approached by a group of businessmen in 1958 to examine the possibility of starting a third newspaper. Warren first rejected the idea after calculating the start-up costs of a new daily at $14-$15 million. But introduction of fast offset printing technology in the early 1960s by the Danish company Aller, which allowed crisp color reproduction, slashed that figure to $4-5 million, by Warren’s estimate. He contracted with the U.S. firm R. Hoe and Co., which held the North American rights for the Aller process, for the Canadian franchise and a lease on $3 million worth of presses at a monthly cost of $20,000. Starting a free-distribution weekly pilot newspaper he called Metro Times, Warren planned a nation-wide chain of new dailies to be published using the low-cost offset technology, the first of which would be the Vancouver Times. He told Marketing magazine in 1963: “Failure is impossible – we haven’t even considered it.”

The Enterprise

Warren declined an offer of financial backing from Hoe in favor of selling shares in his new venture to the public. Setting up a booth at the annual Pacific National Exhibition agricultural fair in East Vancouver during the summer of 1963, Warren showed a color promotional film to potential investors and offered survey results to show that more than 80,000 subscribers would buy a third newspaper, publishing in the afternoon, which he claimed could expect to earn $6.5 million in annual revenue.
 
Warren raised $1.65 million within a year by selling shares at $10 apiece, mostly to small investors in blocks of $300 to $400.  He recruited a solid corps of veteran newsmen, including former Province managing editor Bill Forst as editorial director, former Province and News-Herald managing editor Aubrey Roberts as assistant publisher, and former Star publisher Gen. Victor Odlum, who had been out of the newspaper business for more than thirty years and was then 83, as chairman of the board. From the beginning, Warren played on public distaste for the Pacific Press monopoly, which had lost any local ownership since the Sun had been bought in 1963 by the fast-growing F.P. Publications chain, based in Winnipeg and led by Calgary oilman Max Bell. Marketing magazine noted, in assessing the new daily’s chances: “For a long time now there has been some mild concern in Vancouver over the city’s general newspaper situation. . . . there is a feeling around that both papers are the same.” Maclean’s magazine reported Warren’s ambitions in 1963 under the headline: “Hot, hopeful rumors for Vancouverites who are fed up with their daily newspaper. . . His confidence is buoyed by his conviction that Vancouver is fed up with Pacific Press, the Southam-Max Bell holding company that owns both the Sun and Province.”

An undated “information package” prepared for the Times’ board of directors set out the anti-Pacific Press strategy. “Since the merger took place, the public has felt, and witnessed with shock, the difference it made to our city. . . . Sensationalism has run rampant from front page to editorial page. . . . Ad rates have increased dramatically.”  Noting a development at the Los Angeles Times in 1963, which saw typesetters who had been made redundant by new technology given lifetime job guarantees and transferred to other duties, the document saw an opportunity to exploit the resulting labor unrest at Pacific Press: “Merging two mechanical staffs into one publishing plant, with various unions involved, we predict that labor will obviously take the same stand and demand that no man lose his job.”  The information package provided to directors did foresee a possible obstacle the Pacific Press papers could pose to the success of the Vancouver Times.
 

There is a possibility that pressure will be brought to bear on leading advertisers to stay out of the Times, but the only two motives that could be used are loss of preferred ad position in the newspaper, and offering space for less money. . . . however, this approach seems unlikely. The two large publishing groups who now control the Pacific Press have a fifty year history of respect for profits.
 

Hitting the Streets

The first edition was planned for September 5, 1964, and promotion went into high gear at that summer’s PNE fair in East Vancouver, with a large booth set up to sell subscriptions. By the time the Times hit the streets with a thick sixty-six-page inaugural edition, it had signed up 73,000 customers, which proved too many for the fledgling newspaper to deliver, reported the trade magazine Canadian Printer & Publisher.
 

Routes were based on a predicted 50,000. Consequently, some areas received first-day editions 24 hours late. To compound the problem, only about 80,000 copies were run and none were available in corner stores. Some were filched from doorsteps, and one carrier lost his entire load of papers when he put his bag down at the side of the road to make a delivery. An antiquated make-shift switchboard couldn’t cope with the volume of calls for a week.
 

Public reaction to the Times was mixed. “The ‘entirely different’ format promised by the Times . . . had the anticipated impact on the public, but for many the new look was too radical,” noted Canadian Printer & Publisher. “Each potential subscriber had his own concept of what the ‘difference’ would be.”  Subsequent editions in the paper’s first week of publication averaged sixteen broadsheet news pages, with an eight-page classified advertising section and a sixteen-page tabloid magazine. “They used to say we wouldn’t get off the ground,” said Warren. “Now they’re trying to say we won’t last. Well, we’ve got off the ground and there is no chance of us going broke for the next ten years. Failure is impossible.”

The publisher’s enthusiasm was understandable given the initial success of his new daily newspaper. “Warren admits that it feels good to talk like this after six years of being taunted and mocked as an inexperienced babe in newsprint,” noted Stainsby in Saturday Night. “There can be little doubt that he saw a magnificent chance when others didn’t, and he grabbed it.”

But even before it published its first edition, the seeds of the Times’ demise had been sown. Of the $1.8 million received from share sales by then, almost $1 million had gone to initial “organization, development and finance costs.”  By the time the first papers hit the streets, the Times was so cash-strapped that it had less than $200,000 on hand to meet working costs and a payroll of more than 300. “This was the pinched shoe from which The Times, faced with poor response from advertisers, was never able to escape,” according to Webster.  Warren, who controlled the Times board of directors through his ownership of all 6,000 Class B shares of the company, which gave him the right to appoint three of the seven board members and hold the deciding vote as president, had also received, in addition to his $51,178 salary as publisher starting in 1962, $75,000 for the “goodwill” of his closed weekly shopper, Metro Times, along with reimbursement for more than $37,000 in expenses for the “pilot” publication.  The cosy financial arrangements the publisher made for himself created tension with other executives as money became increasingly tight at the new daily. Warren’s management style didn’t help matters, according to Webster.
 

It is no secret that Warren’s personality created many a clash with fellow directors, executives and staff. . . . An early blow to staff morale came with the abrupt resignation, a few days after the first edition, of the first managing editor, Geoffrey Molyneux, regarded as a brilliant newspaperman. Molyneux decided there was no future for him on the Times and he went back east.
 

Fighting Back

By March, the Times was in desperate financial straits. On March 26, the newspaper could not afford to pay its non-mechanical staff, and in desperation prepared a front-page editorial which Webster described as “unique in newspaper history.”  Under the headline “Times fights for survival,” the editorial issued a plea for support. “Why do we exist? And who are we fighting? Have you forgotten that the daily press of our city was under one-company control? Have you forgotten the brand of journalism that permeated this community?”  The Times editorial blamed everyone in sight for its plight, except its own management.
 

There are those in our community who – from the first week of publication – have judged The Times abruptly and harshly: complaints ranging from not getting a newspaper on time to “The Times stands for nothing, thereby accomplishes nothing.” There are leading advertisers in our community who, to date, have never bought an ad in The Times, not even a congratulatory ad in our inaugural issue.
 

The spectre of Pacific Press was raised in the front-page Times editorial, which made a veiled reference to interference with its operations by the entrenched Sun and Province: “Fighting a two-newspaper, one-company-control octopus on all levels of our society has been a 24-hour-a-day job. We have a hundred bonafide reasons to holler ‘foul’ on the front page of The Times – but we have not.”  But when radio hotliner Webster, one of his own columnists, pressed Warren on the issue, he offered no examples. “To be frank, I was prepared to believe his allegation if publisher Warren could produce proof,” offered Webster. “But when I challenged him publicly he wouldn’t, or couldn’t amplify his allegations.”

The other complaint addressed in the front-page editorial of March 27 was that of editorial content. In defense of its product, the Times editorial fairly scolded the readers and advertisers who had scorned it: “What did you expect from a new newspaper – 90 pages daily? Top columnists? Forty pages in ads every day, from the first day of publication? Did you expect an editorial policy that satisfied every member of our community daily? Then you expected too much.”   While it had launched itself with great promises of editorial vigor, in print the Times had lodged itself firmly on the fence. “The news pages did not live up to the advance billing that The Times would step on toes and stir things up to get them moving,” noted Webster. “The Vancouver Times wavered and waffled in its editorial policies. It was neither fish nor foul nor plain red herring.”  The Times admitted its failings editorially in its front-page plea, in which it asked for more time to find its way.
 

No, we have not reached the pinnacle of editorial success we set out to achieve, but we make no further apologies for our product – a daily newspaper. A new newspaper needs time to mold a policy, time to learn how to step hard and decide in which direction; and we are learning every day. In another six months we will be that much better a newspaper from front page to comics.
 

Part of the impetus for the Vancouver Times had in fact been political, and it did have Social Credit sympathies. The undated, unsigned “information package” provided to Times directors had listed among the reasons to create a new daily the unfavorable coverage of the provincial government by the Pacific Press dailies: “The Sun, carrying the Liberal party banner, accelerated one of the most vicious vengeance campaigns ever waged in the Canadian press. It has set out to undermine, obstruct and destroy the Social Credit party that has been in power in B.C. for twelve years, and today enjoys a whopping majority in the House.”  On a carbon copy of the document contained in the papers of former Times assistant publisher and board member Aubrey Roberts in the Vancouver City Archives, the word “whopping” is stroked out in pen and replaced with “large.”

The political motivation seemed an open secret from the outset, and had been broadly hinted at in the trade magazine Canadian Printer & Publisher as early as its January, 1963 issue. While recording Warren’s insistence the new daily would be “non-partisan and have no political affiliations,” the magazine noted: “It has been known for some time that the Social Credit party, if not actually the government, has been interested in establishing a newspaper, because of the faint support for Social Credit shown by most existing B.C. papers.”

The non-mechanical payroll that had been missed on Friday, March 26, was postponed until the following Wednesday, and in its front-page editorial the Times issued a plea for a further cash infusion from the public in the form of debenture sales. In its first seven months of operation, the new daily had lost $1.3 million, including $235,000 in one month alone.  Cost controls were non-existent initially, according to Young. “In the first three months alone the editorial staff went through $200 worth of ballpoint pens, a small item but one of many that added up.”  Now in financial straits, Times management clamped down on costs and issued a public plea for another $100,000  to help see the newspaper through its money problems. The appeal was successful in raising $90,000 and the missed payday was made up as promised on March 31.

In its next edition after the front-page plea for support, the Times announced it had received an overwhelming response to its call and promised in another front-page editorial: “We are not going to throw in the sponge.”  Also in that issue it made a bold gambit that sought to solve its advertising problem, but which ultimately may have worsened it. A full page inside that day’s editions of the Times was devoted to an attack on its most reluctant customer. Under the headline “This space reserved for Woodward’s Stores Ltd.,” the Times set out its grievances against the province’s largest retailer. “For reasons unknown to us The Times has been denied any ads from Woodward’s since our commencement of publication,” the editorial complained. “We do not think this is fair to our subscribers. We are also certain that we now enjoy a wide readership, and that ads run in The Times can prove to be productive, if given a chance.”  The Times went as far as to offer Woodward’s two free pages of advertising a week, free of charge, until the department store chain decided the customer response was worth paying for.

Not only was the ploy unsuccessful, it may have even backfired as other retailers wondered why they should pay for ads when The Times was offering free space to a major competitor. “The public reaction to this open pressure play was double-edged,” wrote Webster. “Some people felt the store should have advertised, if only in a token manner, as a gesture of support for a new community venture. Others felt The Times was guilty of advertising blackmail in the poorest taste.”  Radio reporter Mark Raines approached Woodward’s executives for their reaction, but was unable to obtain an interview, instead being given a statement from the retailer that said, in effect: “If we decide to advertise, we’ll pay for it, but we won’t submit to intimidation.”

It seemed that in its desperate hour the best hope for the Times was that its Pacific Press competition would be shut down by a strike. The ITU had voted overwhelmingly to walk out in support of its demands for job guarantees in the face of automation in the new plant Pacific Press was building. Warren told creditors that in the event of a strike at Pacific Press, the Times was preparing to double its edition size and boost its press run to 80,000.  At the same time, he boldly announced a second newspaper for his planned nationwide chain, telling a group of Toronto admen in early April that an Edmonton Times would be launched in 1966 and that a similar title in Quebec would be announced soon. “In five years he expects all five papers to be rolling,” reported Canadian Printer & Publisher. “Each paper will be financed by the community. There will be no financial link between the papers, but as a co-operative they will set up an Ottawa office together to pool features and combine sales efforts, for example.”

Renewed Hope

In the midst of his newspaper’s financial problems, Warren watched a local media development that suddenly offered his flagging daily new hope. CJOR radio “hotline” host Pat Burns had created a sensation on the West Coast starting in 1963 with his no-holds-barred phone-in show he named after a news item of the day – the Kennedy-Khrushchev phone link of the Cuban Missile Crisis. But after complaints to the federal Board of Broadcast Governors put the station’s licence in jeopardy, CJOR president Marie Chandler fired Burns. A rally by his supporters drew an overflow crowd to the downtown Queen Elizabeth Theatre, and Warren quickly moved to cash in on Burns’ popularity, signing him up as a Vancouver Times columnist in an attempt to boost  circulation. A front-page announcement on April 1 proved no April Fool’s Day put-on, and the paper’s overworked switchboard “lit up like a Christmas tree.”  The Times announced it would devote “a half page presentation of his strongly-opinionated views on a society with which he often finds himself at angry odds.”
 

This time, though, he is out in the open where the Burns haters, sometimes as dedicated as his devotees, will have the opportunity for rebuttal. For every half page of Burns that The Times publishes there will be equal space for those who feel they have cause to hit back. He will be on his own and critics, who charged in the past that those he attacked were not given fair opportunity to reply, can now have their innings.
 

Meanwhile, Warren continued his campaign to convince Woodward’s to come on board as a Times advertiser. Another full-page editorial devoted to the department store chain’s continued absence from the Times ran April 13 and addressed the backlash management had felt after the paper’s initial attack on the retailer. “Some said it was an unethical effort,” the editorial admitted. “We were hurt and bleeding, on the brink of having to still our presses. If we were to go under, we wanted all to know how hard we had tried.” But still Woodward’s refused to patronize the paper, with which its relations had been “strained from the outset,” according to Times business editor Bruce Young.

Before April was up, the annual shareholders meeting of the Times Publishing Company Limited was scheduled, and Warren had to report publicly that by the end of December the fledgling enterprise had lost “an awful lot of money – $903,000.”  But Warren declared that the months since had been a “growth period,” with revenues in March up thirty-eight per cent over those for January, with costs down by thirty-two per cent.  “He admitted the paper has required more money to get off the ground than originally estimated,” reported the Times. “He said the losses in the shake-down period were twice those anticipated and knocked a big hole in the company’s financial reserves. . . . ‘I shudder to tell you the risk we ran in those first 90 days.’”

But Warren was putting a brave face on a desperate situation. In May, he needed a moratorium from creditors on $200,000 in overdue bills, and had to ask the Hoe company for more time to pay $100,000 the Times owed on the lease of its presses.  Before May was out, Warren decided to throw in the sponge after all and announced the Times would convert to a weekly publication in June. “The move from a daily to a weekly is being made to prevent further losses of working capital, and arrive into a profit area, by reducing labor and material costs by 50 per cent,” explained the Times on its front page of May 26. The new Times Weekly, it announced, would join a “select group” of respected newspapers across the globe that published only once a week, including the Sunday Times of London, Paris Match, Der Spiegel, and The Economist. The Times predicted its new weekly incarnation would “attract even larger numbers of readers in the weeks ahead. Immediate goal is a weekly circulation of 75,000, rising to 100,000 within the next few months.”  At a press conference, Warren declared that circulation of the Times Weekly could go as high as 150,000 and enable it to re-enter the daily field. The Vancouver Sun noted that the largest weekly newspaper in the area was the North Shore Citizen, with a circulation of 16,000.  Staff of the Times was slashed by half in preparation for its conversion to a weekly, but others in management objected to the capitulation and reasoned that with the prickly Warren out of the way their newspaper might have a fighting chance of remaining a daily, according to Young.
 

To the schemers, it seemed that even as a daily the paper could only survive if new advertising were forthcoming as a result of Warren’s ouster – Woodward’s advertising in particular. Warren heard of the plot and called the participants into his board room. For an hour, he scolded, berated and harangued them. “Go back to your jobs – I’ll see what can be done to save this paper,” he said. Two hours later Warren called a staff meeting and announced he was stepping out of the picture.
 

To raise needed capital, an issue of 200,000 new Class A shares was authorized for sale at $5 apiece, but provincial superintendent of brokers Bill Irwin, noting that $3 million had already been invested in the Times by the public, restricted sale to current shareholders to prevent spread of what had obviously become a highly-speculative venture.  A meeting of shareholders was scheduled for June 2 at the Hotel Vancouver in hopes of gaining the needed financial support. Former Warren lieutenants Forst and Roberts, who had earlier jumped ship after clashing with the paper’s founded, clambered back aboard. In a front-page plea on the public meeting “day of decision,” editorial director Forst said: “It must be impressed on everyone concerned, not only with the Times, but with the basic concepts of free expression of opinion and independent presentation of news and advertising that this newspaper represents their last hope for a community-owned newspaper within their lifetimes.”  With that edition, the Times appropriated the former boast of the Vancouver Sun, before it came under absentee corporate ownership, emblazoning under its front-page flag: “Vancouver’s Only Home-Owned Newspaper.”
 
At the shareholders’ meeting, Publisher Odlum announced that Warren’s contentious Class B shares would be nullified. Odlum told the assembly of more than 1,000 that he would personally take over business operations of the Times and former News-Herald city editor Bill Bell would become managing director. Managing editor Brud Delany resigned and Mike Tytherleigh, the paper’s magazine editor, was named to fill his spot. An immediate $50,000 was required to continue publication, the meeting was told, but when the cheques and pledges were collected from the audience, only just over $19,000 was counted. Announcing that an additional $10,000 had been pledged by Times employees, Bell said a decision on continuing the Times as a daily would be deferred until the 6,000 shareholders who had not attended the meeting were solicited for support. The Times headlined developments triumphantly on its front page the next day: “‘Owners’ rally round paper.” But the Vancouver Sun saw the result less optimistically, under the headline: “Times Faces new Financial Crisis.” Noting Warren’s absence from the meeting, the Sun reported that several speakers were “highly critical of his operation of the paper.” It quoted Odlum as calling Warren “‘a man of many skills – a bit of a dreamer.’ He said he and the former president had been ‘friendly enemies’ and there was a deep difference of opinion.”  City editor Barney McKinley told the meeting he resigned, according to the Sun: “He added the paper’s news staff now consists of Forst, managing editor Mike Tytherleigh and two women writers.”
 
Under Tytherleigh, the Times again changed its look, according to Young, this time out of necessity. “With a staff so thin that he could only spare one man for straight reporting work, he brought out a North American copy of the popular British newspapers – big headlines, an informal approach and a breezy, if shallow, outlook. He could not pretend to cover the news, especially the local news. Circulation dropped to 40,000.”  And while relations with Woodward’s improved after Warren’s ouster and “amicable discussions” were held, according to Young, nothing more resulted and advertising sales by a decimated staff dwindled.
 

When Warren left, the so-called “tin cup approach” stayed. The salesmen sold stock instead of advertisements. There was apparently no other way of meeting a monthly deficit that persisted in running well over the $50,000 mark, even after drastic economies. The scramble to raise funds to meet payrolls became part of life at the Times. Advertising salesmen were switched onto collecting receivables instead of soliciting new sales. Circulation men had to concentrate on collections rather than subscription drives.
 

The End

The financial shell game continued until finally the plug was pulled abruptly on August 6, with a final edition headline of “We’re Taking a Pause,” announcing the paper’s demise. Most of the remaining 150 employees had not been paid for the final eight weeks. Most of the July circulation income had gone toward the necessities of ink and newsprint. Suppliers had been refusing for months to deliver without immediate cash payment. Even up until the last day, directors of the newspaper were meeting with an un-named “Vancouver financier,” who was prepared to invest $500,000 in exchange for control of the Times, according to Young. The offer was rejected by the directors, who felt the arrangement was “not compatible with the interests” of the other shareholders, according to Young, “most of them little people who had been induced to invest in Vancouver’s ‘third daily newspaper.’”

Webster’s long analysis of “the somewhat pathetic end of a bold experiment,” appeared in the next day’s Vancouver Sun, having obviously been prepared well in advance. While giving Warren “full credit for achieving the seemingly impossible,” he gave the compliment with a back-handed swipe: “Virtually by his own efforts . . . he did produce a newspaper. Little more can be said in his favor.”  Like almost everyone else, Webster blamed Warren’s naivete most of all: “There is no doubt in my mind that Warren never took off his rose-tinted glasses when predicting the financial future of his paper.” But the broadcaster thought the paper might have succeeded under better management.
 

At one time, in my view, The Times had a chance, but only under different and more efficient management. It is significant that until the end, The Times maintained a circulation of 40,000 copies a day. These were people who liked the paper and wanted to see direct competition for The Sun and The Province. Other Vancouver people obviously resented the apparent monopoly of Pacific Press. . . . The Times’ promoters were banking, too, on advertiser resentment against Pacific Press. It failed to materialize.
 

In fact, the effect of competition from a third daily newspaper had only caused Pacific Press to prosper. The leading Sun “grew fatter,” with its circulation now up to 240,000, observed former Times business editor Bruce Young in Canadian Printer and Publisher. “The day the Times announced it could carry on no longer, a top advertising man at the Sun expressed his regret,” reported Young. “Not because he felt any remorse over the death of an upstart but because its very presence had spurred his salesmen to greater than usual efforts.”

Conclusions

Vancouver was indeed a booming city with a rapidly-growing population, but most of the migrants came from other parts of the country, and they did not always share the same underdog sympathies of long-time residents. The popular indignation of native Vancouverites that Warren and his followers had been counting on to support the Times in its bid to fill a perceived newspaper vacuum had gone the same way as “the dynastic Cromie boast of a locally owned newspaper blown away by a prevailing easterly wind,” according to Ben Metcalfe in a 1986 history of local newspapers for Vancouver magazine.
 

What they found was that, while they did have a truly local newspaper in embryo, there was no vacuum nor enough popular indignation or money to support them. The truth was that Vancouver newspaper readers, comprising more and more “naturalized” than Old Vancouverites, were caring less and less that their newspapers were owned in the east.

The brief life of the Vancouver Times is a case study in the economics of the newspaper industry, which discourages market entry with high-start-up costs and makes survival tenuous for the period before enough advertising can be attracted to turn a profit. The offset printing technology which dropped the start-up costs from $14-15 million to $4-5 million, by Warren’s calculation, opened a window of opportunity for the Times. But the window was slammed shut by poor financial management, including undercapitalization and lack of cost control. A government-sanctioned monopoly of two entrenched dailies sharing production facilities, with a well-established base of advertisers, is unlikely to be challenged seriously by competition from a third newspaper. In Vancouver, as predicted, it has not happened since the Times.