The 27% Solution

     If you’re having trouble finding time to shop, cook and clean, don’t blame yourself. You’re just reading the newspaper 27% more than you used to.
     That’s the findings from something called NADBank which, according to its website, “provides newspaper readership data for 84 daily newspapers in 53 markets and 60 community newspapers in 33 markets across Canada.” The results of its 2010 survey were immortalized in a “National Post readership jumps 27%” headline in – where else? – The National Post.

No readers? No problem! Vancouver newspapers boost their readership by handing out free copies to bus riders. Photograph by Angela Dunn

     The best way to describe the paper to the (subtract the 2…carry the three…) 73% of you who aren’t reading it anymore than they used to is that it’s a broadsheet (they run serious news stories…) with a tabloid spirit (…under lots of pretty pictures and ironic headlines), and is often a mouthpiece to Canada’s ruling (but unpopular) conservative government. The Post is probably best known for three columnists (the blowhard former owner of the paper who’s served jail time, a bitchy columnist who dumped on a politician shortly after he died, and some poor bugger who writes editorials defending the blowhard and the bitch). And while that makes the paper sound like it’s jam-packed with hard-hitting, right-wing journalism, all it took was 27% to turn The National Post into a press junketeer. A twenty-seven percent increase in readership? TWENTY-SEVEN PERCENT?? The Post’s publisher (who calls the paper “unique” and “engaging” and “award-winning”) said he’s “thrilled” with his awar- er, the NADBank results.
What’s not to like 27% more of?
     Well, apparently a lot.

     In Vancouver, B.C., we tried – and couldn’t - replicate NADBank’s findings with regard to a 27% increase in National Post readership.

     Corner stores and supermarkets we talked to reported stable sales (“the same number of copies as ever”, one vendor said) and carriers who deliver the paper door-to-door said they didn’t notice any increase in volume either. We even counted the number of newspapers in five coin-operated boxes on street corners for a week; once in the morning and again at night. And we still couldn’t find those 27% more readers.
     Were the new 27% of National Post readers hiding? Would we have to flush them out? Message boards and chat rooms didn’t yield any new readers of the paper so we decided to go to where The Post ends up. We monitored blue recycle boxes in various Vancouver neighbhourhoods to see how many people read The National Post. Out of a 500 points-of-call sampling we could only find 12 homes that were reading The National Post.
Undaunted, we went to those who were buying the paper at newsstands. Maybe they were reading the paper 27% more than they used to? Maybe housewives were getting into the financial section? Maybe adolescent girls were hogging the sports page? But even they expressed surprise at the bump in readership – up to a point. “Twenty-seven per cent?” said one Post reader. “I think that’s hopeful.”

By Ken Lee and Ken MacDonald
Special to TheNationalDocumentarian

Curtains for the Vancouver International Film Festival?

Ashes to ashes, buzz to dust: empty seats plague the Vancouver Internaltional Film Festival.

     What if they held a film festival and no one came?

     That’s the reality that’s sinking in for organizers, programmers and hangers-on of the Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF), now celebrating its 30^th - and perhaps final - year. An aging audience, niche events like the Jewish and Asian film festivals - not to mention a myriad of other movie-viewing options and formats - have made the VIFF irrelevant.  

     Suffering from a lack of vision, direction, and the “pull” required to attract event movies, the festival has always been a pale imitator of its more successful Toronto counterpart. As far back as the early 1990s a communications coordinator with the VIFF openly complained that promising filmmakers – in a devastating indictment of the VIFF’s lack of clout – consistently skip the Vancouver festival in favour of opening their film to the public directly. 

     “When the festival is top-heavy with documentaries and short on celebrities it calls itself a ‘real film’ festival,” said a former VIFF official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “When it thinks it’s snagged a ‘somebody’ (usually a minor TV celebrity) it emphasizes the ‘glamour’ angle. Neither sticks nor works and the clock’s run out.” Indeed, Netflix now offers movies and TV shows on demand and libraries have been stocked with obscure, foreign films on DVD for years.

      But this year is proving to be particularly painful for the VIFF. The festival is being largely ignored by the major media and the public in favour of a story about the newly renovated B.C. Place Stadium. And those outlets that are covering the festival report that the VIFF – which prides itself on showing movies championing social causes – chose a venue for the opening gala that’s been behind picket lines for months. In a comment that seems prescient and prophetic of the future of the festival itself, the VIFF estimates about a third of patrons expected to attend the opening gala did not attend.

By Jason Lee

With additional research by Ken MacDonald in Vancouver, Canada

Special to TheNationalDocumentarian