There are two factors. I will give you a very broad answer, but I will still help you to understand what I believe is at the heart of the industry.
Earlier, you saw the tables on intention to read the news. Young people no longer want to read a paper copy of the newspaper. Regardless of the quality of the newspaper we give them on paper, they will not read it. In the long term, in the next 10 years, the print copy, black and white newspaper that is not interactive or updated every minute will inevitably cease to exist. Young people are growing up with tablets, iPhones and smart phones. We started from there.
It is also important to understand how the distribution network works. I will give you an example. We deliver La Presse to remote areas such as La Tuque. A truck cannot make more than 65 stops. That is the method of distribution. Fifty years ago, the truck made 50 stops. It would arrive in La Tuque, which is quite far from Montreal, and would leave about 100 copies of the newspaper. Just before we made the transition to tablet, the truck was making the same trip but was only leaving five copies of the newspaper in La Tuque. The distribution costs were enormous.
At La Presse, we managed to cut our shipping, printing, and ink costs by $80 million. Those are not value-added elements. In the media, value-added elements are the people who make the news and those who sell advertising. They generate revenue. The rest is an industrial approach. The industrial approach is changing.
To answer your question about the regions, I have to say that all of the studies have shown that local newspapers will survive a little longer than newspapers in major markets, but that the same fate awaits them. They need to move toward digital platforms.
The competition between the major digital players in the regions is much less than in the large markets with Google, Facebook, and other Internet sites, but it is still inevitable. The regions will experience the same thing as the big cities.