Falling Star

There was carnage in the Canadian media industry while we were sunning ourselves down south. Multimedia conglomerate Rogers Communications announced yet another job-shedding restructuring; one of the country's oldest local papers, in Guelph, Ontario, will publish its last edition this Friday; and the Toronto Star, which some how combines a stridently left-wing editorial stance with ferocious focus on its own bottom line, outsourced the printing of the paper (with a loss of 200 skilled jobs) and offered buyouts to its entire newsroom.

No profession is more self-regarding than journalism, and the Star has been full of stories warning us how much we'll miss the old-style media when they're gone.  Here's an example, written by Heather Mallick. Ms Mallick is a good writer, provided you can stomach her strident, sometimes hate-filled form of feminism, and she's apparently an ace speller, since she won the Star's in-house spelling bee this year.  But she's not a journalist. She doesn't investigate stories and reveal scoops; she expresses her opinions about whatever takes her fancy -- or, more often, about whatever puts her back up. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, but it's not the kind of newspaper work that helps prevent us from slipping into a fascist dictatorship, as she seems to imagine.

Reading the Star these days is dispiriting.  Without actually counting the column inches, I'd venture to suggest that more than half of the "news" content is provided not by the paper's own editorial staff but by wire services -- Canadian Press, AP, Slate, Bloomberg and many others. Some of the reporters who remain on staff don't exactly seem to be heavy hitters; today the paper ran on its front page this story about an absurd woman who is hiring someone to manage her love life, she herself being too busy to do so.

That seems to be the future for the Star, and very likely for many other newspapers that can't quite figure out a way forward.  The older hands will take the buyout, leaving the paper to be filled with wire service content and puff pieces by inexperienced reporters.  And all the columnists, Ms Mallick and the rest, will stay on,  making the Star less and less of a newspaper and more and more, a views-paper. Those columnists had better hope their families and friends all take out subscriptions, because I'm not sure the rest of us will want to for much longer.  Me, I'll hang in with the paper for now -- my wife likes the daily sudoku --  but when I'm looking for serious news coverage, you'll find me online.

UPDATE, 29 January: I posted the paragraphs above before the Star had to publish a correction of one of the main claims made by Heather Mallick in her original article. I don't want to be mean about it -- I'll leave the meanness to Ms Mallick, who specializes in it -- but just what does that correction tell us about Ms Mallick's pretensions to be a "journalist"?