“And now,” the editor of the Globe and Mail wrote in that newspaper’s pages a few weeks ago, “our hyper-innovative cartoonist is about to break new ground in partnership with our boundary-busting video-editor-cum-impresario, Jayson Taylor.”
This is how you write when you have no ambition except to appear modern. For a writer in the grip of such a frenzy it is no longer enough to innovate, nor even to super-innovate. Ground may be broken but boundaries must be busted. But none of this hyper-busting was boundary-innovative enough. Two weeks later the author of those lines, Ed Greenspon, was an ex-editor-cum-unemployed.
“Reimagination-inspired teamwork during the last four years has reinforced the value of a more collaborative way of managing our business,” Globe publisher Philip Crawley wrote to the newspaper’s staff in a memo explaining why Greenspon had moved on to “new challenges.” To “cement our standing as the best in Canada at creating high-quality content,” Crawley needed a replacement.
The next day’s paper featured a story about the new man, John Stackhouse. “Amid the flux in the media sector,” the story said, Stackhouse had delivered himself of this pearl: “It doesn’t matter if it’s detailing the recession or covering a war in Africa or social trends in India. And it doesn’t matter if it’s a 5,000-word story in a newspaper, or a tweet or a blog. The basic challenges are the same: finding out information that matters to people.”
So I can report that despite a bit of flux in the management sector, the Globe’s bosses remain committed to waterboarding the English language whenever they get a chance.
Perhaps it is old-fashioned to pay attention when a newspaper changes editors. Surely it’s old-fashioned to complain when a great paper’s managers seem interchangeably eager to brutalize the language. Still, a reader worries.
I read the Globe very nearly every day for 20 years, but these days I hold a copy maybe twice a week. Most days I read a half-dozen Globe stories online and don’t miss the rest. I hate to break it to Phil Crawley, but my main problem as a reader is not that the Globe is insufficiently thrilled by the marvels of the Internet. It is that too often the paper reveals too little about the depth and richness of the stories it covers. Stackhouse has this much right at least: it doesn’t matter which technology they use to get the content to me, if there is no reason to care when it arrives.
Of course there is good journalism every day in the Globe. Every reader has a list of favourite writers. Mine includes Doug Saunders, Mark MacKinnon, Eric Reguly. But the arts section is horribly conflicted, assigning pop-culture subjects to snobs who would look down their noses at a gig with Cahiers du Cinéma. And the Ottawa coverage is pathetically obsessed with insider gossip at the expense of clear thinking about questions of governance.
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