TorStar and Postmedia had quietly swapped papers and without warning shut down any competition in 34 markets across Ontario. As the Financial Post noted:
Postmedia Network Inc. and Torstar Corp. announced Monday they traded 41 publications and plan to close 36 papers in places where they compete. The shuttering of 34 papers in Southern Ontario, one in Winnipeg and one in Vancouver will eliminate 291 jobs and save each company between $5 million to $7 million annually.Barrie Today called it a ‘sad day’:
The companies say they remain committed to local news and are only closing papers in regions served by multiple publications.
Sixteen employees at the Barrie Examiner lost their jobs and 11 more people at the Orillia Packet and Times are out of work in a mega-newspaper swap between Torstar Corp. and Postmedia Network Inc.
Employees were told at 9 a.m. Monday that the long-time daily publications in Barrie and Orillia, along with counterpart Northumberland Today were shutting down effective immediately.
Eight community newspapers are also closing including the Bradford Times, Collingwood Enterprise Bulletin and the Innisfil Examiner.
Paul Godfrey the CEO who's presiding
over the Postmedia newspaper chain, crocodile tears over the closures
have to be measured against his $1.7
million-a-year salary, his $900,000
retention bonus in 2016 (while he was refusing
to grant employees a tiny cost-of-living wage increase) and his
contract that guarantees him a job until at least 2020. You really
think he gives a damn about the people whose lives he has disrupted?
Tip of the hat to Ian
Chatwick for that one......
Sadly its no longer so much about
presenting the news in an unbiased way but more about profit and
manipulation of opinion, I gess it has been thus for some time but
now there are even less choices available to the reader! There is one
possible bright light on the horizon for online readers (how many
of us actuary read printed newspapers nowadays anyway?) …......
read on!
The
WikiTribune exists because of the disappointing state of news
media right now (it’s worth noting the idea for the site came
before Trump) and the hope is that WikiTribune can outsource news
production to people like the way Wikipedia does.
Jimmy Wales founder of Wikipedia writes …...
The day I opened Wikipedia to the
public, January 15, 2001, it was not an encyclopedia – yet.
Therefore, that was not the launch of an encyclopedia. What was it,
then? It was the launch of a project to build an encyclopedia.
What is this, then? This is the launch
of a project to build a news service. An entirely new kind of news
service in which the trusted users of the site – the community
members – are treated as equal to the staff of the site.
…..........
My goals are pretty easy to understand,
but grand in scope (more fun that way, eh?): to build a global,
multilingual, high quality, neutral news service. I want us to be in
as many languages as possible as fast as possible. I want us to be
more concerned with being right than being first. I want us to report
objectively and factually and fairly on the news with no other agenda
than this: The ultimate arbiters of the truth are the facts of
reality. That’s agenda enough to keep us busy.
I like the concept of this
'community newspaper' in that it could lead to less biased place to
seek our daily input of 'news', time will tell how effective it will
be in filtering the BS and 'fake' news from its pages. Still I really
feel the loss of truly local news, be it in print or online, where
radio is still the mainstay of staying somewhat abreast of what is
happening in your local community.
2 comments:
The concept of Wiki news is a good idea. But I'm not sure researching and reporting the facts of reality is something we can crowd source. That's why it's a profession after all. Whereas anyone can write an opinion piece.
But it won't hurt to try. Intriguing.
As you say Alan, the jurys out on this one. Good to hear from you again!
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