The birth last week of Workopolis.com, the love child begat from the strange union betwixt Globe Information Services and Torstar, may one day be remembered as a momentous turning point for the newspaper industry in Canada. Not, however, because it marked the first time the publishers of the two largest daily newspapers in Toronto set aside their competitive differences for a common strategic goal.
No, if the launch of Workopolis is recalled with veneration years from now it will be because it signaled the beginning of a real transformation in the way the purveyors of news and information do business in this country. It may, in fact, be seen as one of the first concrete steps in a process in which the 200-year-old-plus model of simply delivering a static, pre-determined package of news and information to a passive audience was put to rest.
While Workopolis.com is certainly not the first entrant in the race to dominate the online career resource category, it may end up being the first one to fully register in the consciousness of Canadians all across the country. By any existing measure, Monster.ca and Jobshark.com, are doing a superb job of attempting to meet a need in the marketplace – that is, fast, easy access to a large repository of good job opportunities, along with a healthy measure of useful advice. The advantage the similarly structured Workopolis Web site has over them, however, is its offline connection to good old-fashioned newspapers.
Anyone who has ever had to look for work knows that newspapers are a useful place to seek out opportunities, but almost never the best place to look. Still, the habit of turning to newspapers to look for work is ingrained in the behaviour of most ordinary people, and by joining forces on Workopolis, The Globe and the Star have craftily put in a place a method to transfer the offline goodwill they’ve earned over the years to the Internet. Once they perfect the new model and take further steps to solidify the direct relationships they’ve established with their audience, count on seeing a torrent of new interactive content flowing between the information providers and their audiences.
The only potential hurdle to Workopolis being the spark to make that happen would be an ineffective branding and launch strategy that renders the venture little more than an interesting footnote in the history of the development of the Internet economy in Canada. But that couldn’t possibly happen, could it?
David Bosworth
dbosworth@brunico.com
