Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions)
Your first question comes from Carl Bayard of Genuity Capital Markets. Please proceed.
Carl Bayard - Genuity Capital Markets
Yeah. Thank you. A few questions. In your MD&A, you mentioned that you witnessed a pretty strong performance from Atlantic newspapers. I would think they've been trailing for a while. I wonder if you could just provide a little more color on that. Do you expect to save more from the closure of the Halifax Daily News than the startup losses that you're going to be incurring at Metro?
Francois Olivier
First, our performance in Atlantic has been improving. As you recall, we had acquired assets from Optipress where we had a lot of weeklies there. We had made a few other acquisitions. So last year, at that time, we were integrating and putting a lot of tools, so that people work better together. So, our performance last year was certainly not up to par or where we want it to be. So, when you compare year-over-year, we're doing a lot better. But we are on track to bring the efficiency in the Atlantic as far where we're at with our weeklies in Quebec, which is very efficient.
As far as the second question is concerned, we believe that with our partnership with Metro and Torstar, our objective is to try to breakeven in the first year, and we will have a third of that. So we feel that this is going to be an improvement from where we were with the Halifax Daily News.
Carl Bayard - Genuity Capital Markets
Okay. Great. And you also made a comment regarding the current state of newspapers falling down and that's impacting your negotiations. Is that because people aren't going to commit to long-term contracts or secure minimum volume of copies or something like that, is that the reason or is that what you're seeing?
Francois Olivier
Not really. These discussions are based on mainly two big aspects, the one that is cost, obviously. We need to be cost competitive compared to their present cost base. The other part of the discussion is growing the business, reinventing the product, doing new things in their marketplace, so there is a growth aspect to all of these discussions. And right now, it's very hard for a newspaper publisher in the US to establish what the base revenue is to play with.
And this is what makes them think more and have a wait-and-see approach, because some of their revenue stream, like classified and real estate in particular, and search in particular markets, real estate has been severely hit. And I guess they don't know which part of that is cyclical and which part of that is not going to come back. So they want to assess their base case revenue before they make projections with us over the next couple of years.
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