The writer has no inside knowledge about what is happening there but it was when reading the Toronto Star a few mornings ago that we got the feeling that there is little time left for it. It was not just the announcement of more firings and layoffs or the lack of weight to the complete paper. What it really lacks today is substance and depth.
And here we thought the National Post would be next to bite the dust. That paper has been desperate to just get its distribution to the point of having any meaning. Maybe it is the combination with the Sun newspapers that is keeping the doors open on Paul Godfrey’s American funded fool-hardiness.
Did you know that Joe Atkinson’s modest little Toronto Star newspaper was 124 this year? It still holds on to the circulation honours as Canada’s number one broadsheet newspaper. We are just not sure how long it can keep going.
We would sure miss Chantal Hèbert’s columns. She does a wonderful job bringing Quebec into perspective. A great political reporter such as Bob Hepburn seems to be down to one column a week. We are hoping Martin Regg Cohn is just on a well-earned vacation.
You would think they could do with fewer of those high-priced names on the paper’s board. They hardly seem to be doing a good job of bringing the paper into the 21st century. Our household dropped the less than adequate Sunday print edition and tried the electronic version but that also seems a loser.
But the real concern is in finding sources to replace the news-gathering resources of the Toronto Star that are trustworthy. As much as we appreciate the Ottawa insights of the Ottawa Citizen, the Godfrey biases hang over that newspaper like barrage balloons.
And you can hardly trust anything from the Internet. As much as the Huffington Post works hard, its roots are in a conservative blog. It would probably be justice if this bewildered, beggared blogger returned to where he started his career–embracing the corporate tentacles of the Globe and Mail.
If you are a news junkie, you have come to despise the self promotion, repetition and self-deception of today’s television news programming. You ignore the torn off news clips on radio, rewritten (maybe) from the news wire. Local papers are nothing but wraps for advertising flyers. And the major print media are dying from a death of a thousand cuts. We will all soon be as ignorant as all those followers of the Republican Party candidate in the United States.
-30-
Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry
Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]