A group of investors led by three media veterans — retired Senator Jerry Grafstein, Raymond Heard and Beryl Wajsman — says in a news release issued today that it will seek to buy the National Post, The Ottawa Citizen and The Gazette in Montreal.

The three are among 11 dailies and 26 community papers owned by Canwest LP, which sought protection from creditors on Jan. 8 and announced it would put its publications up for sale.

Arnold Amber, Director of CWA Canada, which represents employees at five Canwest newspapers including the Citizen and Gazette, says this is a heartening development in the media empire's long-running saga of financial distress.

"Our union has maintained all along that the major Canwest dailies would not only survive, but thrive, if their focus was the communities they serve. It sounds like these investors share our vision of newspapers that practise quality journalism and provide good local news coverage — something that cannot be obtained from the Internet," says Amber.

He says the union is prepared to meet with members of the consortium, which says it “represents a cross spectrum of engaged Canadians committed to a vigorous, independent media voice for the communities that each newspaper serves."

Grafstein, founder of CITY-TV in Toronto and other media enterprises both in and outside Canada, told The Canadian Press that he's a "believer in the future of newspapers.

"We believe that there's a strong role for Canadian newspapers in every community. We think they should be locally owned and controlled and we have very interesting and important ideas about how to generate attention and interest on the Internet to support these newspapers."

Wajsman, a broadcast and print journalist, is currently editor of Quebec's largest English weekly, The Suburban, and publisher of The Metropolitan, a bilingual journal of political commentary.

Heard, who was at one time head of (Canwest-owned) Global TV News, is now a media consultant with major corporate clients. Earlier in his career, he was managing editor of the defunct Montreal Star, a White House correspondent and editor of the London Observer News Service.

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