Oh, well. Good thing I’m not invested in the integrity of Macleans all that much.

Not quite. Until last month, a number of Canwest News Service reporters were still officially Ottawa Citizen employees (including Andrew Mayeda and Mike Blanchfield). They have now transferred over to CNS. But The Citizen still maintains autonomous reporting staff on the Hill, in the persons of Glen McGregor and Kathryn May.

Moreover, in the age of the Internet, with its tendency to diffusion, legitimacy is at a premium and established media outlets like the Post could provide it. As it is, their website frontpage just gives me a lot of news I can find elsewhere instantly; looking for interesting content is like a needle-in-the-haystack quest. If good old-fashioned reporting sells physical newspapers, an irresistible online presence brings status in the Zeitgeist, sine qua nihil.

What ever happened to the “voice of the people”. It’s nearly all opinion, very little reporting or investigative reporting on what affects us.

It’s about bias and partisanship and an attempt to manipulate minds…..

Oh to have some decent journalists….where did they all go?

(Mr. Wells – you and one of my favourites, Kady – are an exeption, of course).

1) Beef up reporting, like Wells is on about.

2) Focus on writing ability. Someone mentioned Steyn earlier in this thread and he’s a high school dropout with no journalism background but has become probably the single most well known opinion writer in the world.

3) Develop a muckraking mentality. There are far too many shibboleths here in Canada and they need to be challenged. Consensus is way overvalued and we need more journalists willing to take on the establishment. I find newspapers and political tv shows to be awfully milquetoast, it seems like they don’t want to offend or something.

Small joke.

A look at the history of USA Today would show a very similar trajectory, for the first several years. But USA Today had proprietors who could stick with the investment for longer, and it stabilized in the late 1980s, in the absence of devastating competition from online news sources. The Post would have had to rein in spending sharply by the mid-’00s anyway, and anything I might say about how they did that would be pure back-seat driving. But ‘death spiral’ is an excellent term: the only defence against this industry-wide meltdown, and it’s not a certain defence, is steady investment in journalistic quality. Why is the Globe standing up pretty well? Because despite my frequent gripes, it’s where you flee in Canadian daily newspapers when you want to flee to quality. What’s the only hope for the Post? To become a better newspaper, by extremely old-fashioned definitions of what “a better newspaper” would look like. Their newsroom is still crawling with reporters who are absolutely up to the task, but they could use some help, and their commanders-in-chief are diligently pursuing a long-term strategy of sending just enough soldiers to lose.

The Aspers spun-off a lot of the profit-producing papers in the income trust vehicle some time back. That trust is still making money, I think.

The reason many snicker at the Aspers is (a) because they’re not their father, yet another reminder of the virtues of good corporate governance; (b) they have been lecturing the rest of the country on sound fiscal management for years; and (c) the Torstar group and CTV/Globemedia have been doing rather well.

The problem with Canwest is not the industrywide downturn in newspapers or the declining ad revenues due to a slowing economy. Their problem is that they bought assets at high prices, financed with debt, and are now stuck with them.

I’m not sure what CP costs, and I understand the desire for a national paper to want its own voice (even if it’s, er, shared with the rest of CanWest), but there could hardly be a worse time to turn a news company’s back on CP, because under Rob Russo it’s easily the strongest newspaper bureau in Ottawa. Thanks in no small measure to Rob’s insight in hiring a handfull of dismissed former CanWest reporters. This is part of what I meant when I said ideology didn’t explain the bulk of CanWest’s problems, but I knew that argument was unwinnable before I made it.

But, Wells is right, perspective is important – it’s just that I’m not sure comparing a national newspaper in Canada with “the New Haven Register and hundreds of smaller papers” is the appropriate proxy. I’m no newspaper person, but it would seem to me that, in a general or even regional downturn in the US economy, local advertising from local businesses would be more susceptible to being cut back, no?

The perspective that is missing in both the G&M piece and this blog is the financial history of the National Post since its inception. I was under the impression that Black lost a pantload from its inception, until he unloaded it on the Aspers (at its peak value I thought), and that the paper has never turned in its history an operating profit, even through strong economic times, notwithstanding any trends to free internet content. I stand to be corrected.

A weak balance sheet, with $3.7 billion of debt, puts its market cap at particular risk if decreasing ad revenue limits its ability to service the debt, as the G&M article pointed out.

Unfortunately, this can lead to a death spiral – cutting content and other cost reducing measures, which makes the paper less appealing to readers and hence advertisers, which leads to more cuts, which leads to…

The Ottawa Citizen?

And how prohibitive are CP membership fees to justify CanWest’s decision? I was under the impression that it was 4-5 million for the CanWest group.

I think the problem for the Post is that it’s neither fish nor fowl. It isn’t particularly conservative anymore, except for its excellent work on free speech issues, and it’s not progressive either. They seem to be competing for Globe readers.

It would be a shame if CanWest disappears entirely. Lots of news sources, with different view points, is important in a democracy. They help keep MPs and bureaucrats honest and they shine light on troubling things in our society.

So a drop of 83% is perhaps particularly ghastly?

Snicker.

“This is no isolated case. While all publicly traded newspaper companies have seen their share prices fall in the last year — drops of 50 to 70 percent are commonplace — some have tumbled so far that any number of bargain hunters could snap up a controlling interest, despite the credit squeeze. But they haven’t…

“The market capitalization of the Journal Register Company, publisher of the New Haven Register and hundreds of smaller papers, fell below $1 million last week, down more than 99 percent since the start of 2007. In the same period, GateHouse Media, another publisher of hundreds of small papers, has dropped almost 98 percent, to a market value under $26 million. The Sun-Times Media Group is down 91 percent, to less than $34 million.”

Maybe I’m one of the usual suspects, but baby, snickering don’t cover half of what I’ve been doing the last couple of days.

Speaking of weirdo cults, what happened to Steyn’s columns? Haven’t seen one of those here in weeks.

I would have taken out a Post subscription long ago if I had had any hope of seeing a range of viewpoints on its editorial pages. Not because I dislike right-wing views per se (at least if they have some respect for reason), but because a completely uniform set of opinions is *boring*. They would have been (would still be) much wiser to open their columns to a variety of unusual (non-Globe) political views. Part of the Globe’s strength at present is that Salutin fans, Wente fans, rabid Newfie fans, and Blatchford fans all buy it, in addition to the reasonable Simpson fans. The Post, by contrast, has made even Robert Fulford sound like recycled Will/Krauthammer. It’s like an auto dealership selling only purple cars.

“Usual snickering” is called for in this case, because usual snickering is all the Post ever gave to the Toronto Star, a regional paper which whooped its national behind on a consistent basis. The entire schtick of the Post — bitching about the Star, trying to out-Steyn Steyn, espousing its “libertarian” credentials, running three-day-old Hitchens and Krauthammer pieces — is so self-conscious and attention-hungry that one can’t help but laugh a little bit. If anything, the demise of the Post and the Western Standard is reassuring of the fact that the kind of wingnut welfare that has kept the Weekly Standard and Washington Times afloat doesn’t have legs in Canada.