One of Canada’s two national newspapers, The National Post, will stop printing Monday editions of the publication for three months through the summer.

From July to early September, the generally right-of-centre, decade-old CanWest newspaper will hold the presses one day a week in attempt to claw back some revenue shortfall. The stoppage will effect nine editions and no lay-offs are expected. Earlier this year, the company let go of 560 people.

The company is nearly $4 million in debt and is trying to prevent filing for bankruptcy while balancing the books with a multitude of international assets as well as television and print properties throughout Canada. In a short article this week, the Globe and Mail reported CanWest’s dropping stock value and highlighted the economic challenge currently faced by many news organizations:

Cost-cutting has hit virtually all areas of the media sector amid a pullback in ad spending that has affected all companies from newspapers and magazines to TV stations, radio companies and online businesses.

For its series on the future of newspapers, the CanWest newswire reported that the death of mainstream media is much exaggerated. Author William Wray Carney reflects on the symbiotic relationship of mainstream and new media and also suggest there is no technological replacement for face-to-face interaction. The future could be bright, he writes:

Even for newspapers, the oldest of the old media, there is reasonable room for optimism for the future. As the Aspers consistently point out, the dailies are making money; their financial troubles relate to high debt, not lack of profit, and once the recession ends, they can reasonably expect to increase profit.

There is no mention of the decision by CanWest, owned by the Winnipeg-based Asper family, to put the Monday edition of the Post on a nine-week hiatus. What’s more, despite discussing the future of print media and the news industries in Canada today, the article does not include a single mention of journalism.