Practice what you preach

The Toronto Star is a remarkable newspaper.  For one thing, it's tremendously parochial -- no story is likely to receive front page coverage unless the paper can dig out a Toronto angle, however tenuous.  And it's unapologetically left/liberal, constantly editorialising against unbridled capitalism,  deficit reduction, the hollowing out of the Canadian economy as a result of globalisation, the erosion of workers' rights and so on. A friend of mine used to call it "Pravda", which sometimes doesn't seem like too much of an exaggeration.

So you'd think that yesterday's announcement of the loss of 55 skilled jobs in Toronto, as a result of a corporate decision to outsource, would be just the kind of story that the Star would pounce on and splash on the front page.  The Star's main rival, the Globe and Mail, certainly thought so, giving the story prominence on its website.

Thing is, though, the corporation doing this dastardly deed was none other than the Star itself, which is contracting out a lot of its compositing functions in order to save money.  The Star only found room to print the story in a small column at the bottom of the back page of its business section -- and in today's paper, that whole section, which is normally free-standing, was tucked in after the hockey scores, at the back of the sports section.  How strange.