THE DILEMMA OF THE COMMON MEDIA

Postmedia, a giant in the newspaper industry in Canada, has recently announced that it is revolutionizing the make-up and presentation of some of its primary metropolitan newspapers. There will be a new focus on internet news reporting for transfer to mobiles and tablets and such. As with any corporate announcement this decision is money driven and is accompanied by a note that advertising revenues have been falling off the scale dramatically since the rise of the net; and the arrival on our cyber-doorsteps alternate sources of entertainment information and news.

Read all about it! The newspapering formula seems to have flopped.

In my view it flopped a long time ago. About when the editor’s pen was handed to him every morning by the advertising department head. Editorial integrity died unceremoniously without the hint of a somber parade, piping dirge or modicum of witty repartee at the scribe’s saloon.

Blaming the global demise of the newspaper industry on the mildewing and blowing away of advertising sources is disingenuous in the extreme. Once the editors began kowtowing to the advertisers, they betrayed the trust of their readership. And a readership, as any editor worth his ink should know, is built painstakingly article by article, editorial brick by brick, with scribes on the front lines and in the back rooms armed with torches and recorders, pens and notepads poking about at all hours to get to the bottom of the story to get their lead ‘tits above the board’ - on the top half of Page One and in those glorious days when even contemplating selling any ad space on Page One would have gotten you a free one way ticket to obscurity.

But alas, the ones who were eventually assigned their place in the annals of the obscure were indeed those very those editors who balked at publishers who insisted on a servile, obsequious approach to those wizards behind the curtain, the bland CEO’s of the mega-corporations. Those faceless bean-counting button-pushers controlled the movement of mountains of advertising revenue, squeaked out every three months at significant discounts for being such ‘loyal’ newspaper supporters.

Conrad Black’s old partner – you know the one, that Radler guy who back-shanked little boy Black when their shell game got tougher to hide behind the smoke signals - knew all about firing writers and editors who stood their ground in the integrity department. The shame being: they are probably still unemployed, wasting away on a tab in the scribe’s saloon but at least their last laugh was well-earned, toasting their old bosses decked out behind bars.

When independent ownership of newspapers in Canada dissolved into those mega-corporations (as did most big city dailies anywhere in the world) we could pretty much kiss the editorial life of that paper a long good-bye. And now those newspapers are distressed trying to establish themselves once again as being even the least bit relevant let alone of any editorial bone whatsoever.

TAKE NOTE PUBLISHERS: You can’t betray a readership twice. Loyalty doesn’t offer itself up to your corporate footballing. You’ve priced yourself out of the market because you obliterated that market with your high-handed mediocrity.

By suck-holing to the advertiser in the first place, you strangled the editorial interest of your own paper. You've spilt the juice.

The irony would be exquisite and worth a cackle or two except for the grim fate assigned to those heroic chain-smoking writers of real integrity upon whose backs were written those cheques which inflated those newspaper barons.

The English Bay Banner does not, never has and never will depend on advertising to serve its readership. The last of a dying breed? You bet.