After struggling for over a year with its underperforming tablet app, The Toronto Star has added some digital firepower to its management ranks. Former Boston Globe Managing Editor and Vice President David Skok is set to join the paper as Associate Editor and Head of Editorial Strategy for its digital platforms.
Skok joined The Boston Globe as a digital advisor in 2013, after earlier managing the successful launch of a confederation of Canada-wide news sites at Global News, where he had worked since 2003. The Globe announced earlier this year that he would leave the paper, and his last day at the office was Friday.
Skok’s tenure at Global included a sabbatical to Harvard on a prestigious Nieman Fellowship in 2011-12. While there, he co-authored a widely cited paper on disruption in the news industry with Harvard Business School’s Clay Christensen.
A memo to the Star newsroom sent by editor Michael Cooke said he will start work at the paper in November. Cooke’s memo said Skok will work with the paper’s editors “to develop bold, sharper, edgier ways of telling our stories online, on social platforms, and on various distribution networks.”
Skok’s decision to join the Star comes as the paper has struggled to establish a beachhead in digital news products, and with the hope that he will be able to bring in specialist knowledge from a successful tenure at the Globe – editor Brian McGrory said the digital team led by Skok has boosted the New England paper’s online traffic by twenty percent this year alone.
Last year, the Star launched with much ballyhoo its tablet app Toronto Star Touch. While hopes were that it would reach 200,000 weekly readers by the end of 2016, there are only 55,000-60,000 at present, according to Torstar CEO and Toronto Star Publisher David Holland.
And while the company spent $7.8 million on the app in the first six months of this year, it said it plans to spend only $2 million for the remainder of 2016 – it also laid off 45 staff, including 26 temporary employees mostly from the Star Touch team, in August.
The Star’s parent company, Torstar, has seen digital revenues rise to 17 per cent of total revenue as of July, and the company says it expects to continue to grow those revenues as the print advertising market remains in decline.
Skok’s expertise in disruption will be a valuable asset at a time when the newspaper industry at large is facing precipitous declines in advertising dollars, much of which is being redirected to emerging digital competition.
Related
- Torstar Corp sells Vaughan printing plant for $54M with cash expected to fund pension liabilities, investments
- Toronto Star announces newsroom layoffs, downsizing at tablet app Star Touch
- Torstar Corp slashes dividend for second time this year amid $24.3 million loss
Whether he embraces the tablet initiative or changes course remains to be seen.
But he joins the Star at a time when the state of its leadership is in flux — longtime publisher John Cruickshank left in May, tablet editor Jon Filson left and managing editor Jane Davenport moved to a corporate role in in June, Assistant Managing Editor Wendy Metcalfe left two weeks ago, and interim publisher Holland will step down later this year. That means he will likely have room to put his imprint, which yielded strong results for Global and The Boston Globe, on Canada’s largest circulation daily newspaper.
On July 27, Torstar Corp – the Star’s parent company – reported a $24.3 million loss for the second quarter of 2016 and slashed its dividend for the second time this year. Its quarterly payment to shareholders now stands at 2.5 cents. Torstar also reported a 16.9 per cent drop in print advertising revenues.
Torstar’s Chair John Honderich told the Standing Committee on Heritage in Ottawa on Thursday that, because of the collapse in print advertising in the media industry, “there is a crisis of declining good journalism across __canada and at this point we only see the situation getting worse.”
• Email: seancraig@postmedia.com | Twitter: sdbcraig
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