HuffPost Québec

» see quebec.huffingtonpost.ca as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Le Huffington Post Québec went live on 8 February 2012, built by AOL Canada as the French-language half of a two-edition Canadian operation. Patrick White ran it as editor-in-chief from the launch until October 2018. It ran the house model HuffPost used everywhere, light original reporting stacked on a very large stable of unpaid contributors, and in Quebec that worked well enough to reach a little over a million unique visitors a month inside a media market of roughly eight million people.

The ownership changed twice without the site changing much. Verizon bought AOL in 2015 and folded HuffPost into what became Verizon Media. BuzzFeed agreed to take HuffPost off Verizon's hands in November 2020 and the deal closed in February 2021.

One month after that, on 9 March 2021, BuzzFeed stopped publication at both Canadian editions. Twenty-three people lost their jobs in Canada and forty-seven at HuffPost in the United States on the same day. Nobody in the Montreal newsroom had been told it was coming, and the announcement landed in the middle of a working day, with reporters partway through stories that would never be filed and freelance pieces sitting ready with nowhere to go.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what quebec lost ~

French-language news in Quebec is a concentrated market. Québecor owns a large share of it, Power Corporation owned much of the rest for most of the relevant period, and a national-scale francophone outlet backed by American money was an unusual object in that landscape. HuffPost Québec was not a great newspaper and never claimed to be, but it was a place where a francophone columnist could publish outside the two or three houses that otherwise decide what gets published.

The million-visitor figure matters for that reason. It was not a niche site. In a province of eight and a half million people, a monthly reach of that size puts you in the normal reading diet of a meaningful slice of the population.

~ the calendar people noticed ~

The detail that everybody in Canadian media noticed was the calendar. Employees at HuffPost Canada had filed for union certification roughly two weeks before the closure was announced. BuzzFeed's position was that this was a restructuring decision taken on business grounds and that the Canadian operation was small and unprofitable.

Both things can be true and the sequence still gets remembered, because the sequence is what a newsroom sees. Unionization drives at digital outlets were running through the whole 2019 to 2021 period in North America and this one ended with the bargaining unit dissolved before it existed.

~ nine years still online ~

Publication stopped on the 9th. Certain site features were switched off permanently on the 12th, and the nine years of existing articles were left online as a static archive rather than deleted, which puts this in the better half of media shutdowns. Most of the URLs still resolve.

I do not read Quebec news and never did, and a French-language Canadian edition of an American aggregator sits about as far from a Turkish engineer's browsing history as a live website can. What carries across a language barrier is the shape of the ending: a publisher buys an asset and closes part of it four weeks later, while the people are still at their desks.

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