Brunswick News

Brunswick News Inc. (BNI) was a Canadian newspaper publishing company based on Bloor Street in Toronto.

[1] Once privately owned by James K. Irving and based in Saint John, New Brunswick, it was sold to Postmedia Network in 2022.

In 1936 the New Brunswick industrialist K. C. Irving purchased the Saint John weekly Maritime Broadcaster, which he used as the basis to start a daily newspaper, the Citizen.

A subsidiary company, New Brunswick Publishing Ltd., owned the two Saint John newspapers, the Telegraph-Journal and the Evening Times Globe.

Irving Ltd. had also recently acquired control of the University Press of New Brunswick, which owned Fredericton's Daily Gleaner newspaper.

Irving Ltd. was charged under the Combines Investigation Act because it owned all five of New Brunswick's English language daily newspapers.

[2]: 48–49 The trial judge ruled that the Irving family did have too much control of the New Brunswick media, and that the Moncton papers should be sold.

In 2002 Jamie Irving became publisher of the Kings County Record, a weekly newspaper in which BNI had acquired a minority stake.

[5] In 2017 BNI began delivering packages for Amazon in an expansion of its existing newspaper and flyer delivery network.

[10] On February 7, 2023, in line with similar cuts in other markets, Postmedia announced that the former BNI dailies would further reduce publication to Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays only beginning March 7, 2023.

The Kent Commission recommended (in section 2.a) the creation of new legislation that would "require the break-up of regional monopolies, such as that of the Irving family in New Brunswick, by prohibiting the ownership of two or more newspapers having 75% or more of the circulation, in one language, in a defined geographical area".

"[14] The report went further, stating that "the Irvings' corporate interests form an industrial-media complex that dominates the province" to a degree "unique in developed countries."

At the Senate hearing, journalists and academics cited Irving newspapers' lack of critical reporting on the family's influential businesses.

[15] In June 2019, BNI ended its freelance contract with political cartoonist Michael de Adder following his publication of a cartoon depicting U.S. president Donald Trump encountering the dead bodies of two migrants on a golf course; de Adder told the CBC that Trump was one of the only "taboo" subjects at BNI.