Metro Media CEO still hoping for a solution, one week after shut-down announcement

A week after announcing the "immediate suspension" of Métro Média's activities, the company's president and CEO, Andrew Mulé, is still hoping for some last-minute help to get things back up and running.

"It happened so fast. We just don't know. We're waiting; we don't know exactly what the next steps are. We're taking it one day at a time," he told The Canadian Press Saturday morning.

Faced with financial troubles amid a digital turnaround, the media company, which oversaw over 20 hyperlocal newspapers in Quebec City and Montreal, was forced to stop publishing.

This means the jobs of about 70 people, including roughly 30 journalists, have been made redundant.

"We had already cut our staff from 106 to 70 to try to survive the revenue crisis and get through it," Mulé said.

The CEO had indicated on Twitter that he stopped paying himself a salary last March, something he repeated in his interview.

"The most important thing was to [support] the company's editorial mission. Because if you don't have that, you don't have anything," Mulé said.

"It's not true that I'm more important than my newsroom. I never have been; that's the heart of the company," he added.

On Friday, the Journal de Montréal reported that former Métro Média shareholder Michael Raffoul paid himself a $2.57 million dividend in August 2021, a few months before the company's financial woes began.

Raffoul bought Transcontinental's newspapers in 2018 to form Métro Média.

"It was done when there was a lot of money in the industry," Mulé explained. "We had no reason, at the time, to think we would lose 80 per cent of our revenues. The former shareholder was a distributor of our newspapers -- he gave us his services."

Mulé stressed that, at the time, he was not yet a shareholder in Métro Média.

"I wasn't one of the owners. That decision wasn't mine; I had no [power] over that decision at the time," he said, adding that the dividend payment took place as part of "a restructuring that required a change of shareholder."

According to an article in Le Grenier aux Nouvelles, Mulé became president and CEO of the company in May 2021. Raffoul then became Chairman of the Board.

Asked whether Raffoul's decision to pay himself a few months earlier may have discouraged investors from backing the company after the fact, Mulé said: "That's an excellent question."

"Mike [Raffoul] was ready to give back to the company, but in a structured deal, with the intervention [of other investors]," said Mulé, who in recent months has knocked on numerous doors to get financing, including the Ministère de la Culture et des Communications, Investissement Québec, SODEC and the Ministère de l'Économie.

Mulé points the finger at the City of Montreal as being primarily responsible for the company's downfall for having sounded the death knell for Publisac, the main vehicle for Métro's weeklies.

"We didn't even have anyone working for us within the city itself," said Mulé, who chaired an advisory committee on local newspapers set up by the municipal administration in late 2021.

On Friday, the Quebec Liberal Party called for emergency government assistance to save the press group, as it had done in 2019 to prevent the bankruptcy of Groupe Capitales Médias' newspapers.

Culture and Communications critic Michelle Setlakwe argued $1 million would be "a sufficient sum to enable Métro Média to complete its digital transition, which is already well underway."

Mulé still hopes his plea for help will be heard.

"We've really taken an important digital turn. We really invested in this future, because we believed in it. But we were still on the first floor. If we'd been given a little funding, we'd have gone up one floor at a time."

In 2020 and 2021, the Culture and Communications Ministry paid grants of $393,575 and $348,845 to Métro Média under its program to help press outlets adapt to digital formats, The Canadian Press has learned.

In 2022, the company received $394,821 under the same program; for 2023 the sum was set at $313,276.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published in French on Aug. 19, 2023.