18 Replies to “Not Waiting For The Asteroid”

  1. The Calgary Sun doesn’t appear to be hurting.
    Advertising space outnumbers news articles, at least on the weekends.
    Chrysler and Ford dealers must like the bulk ad rates.

  3. An economic slowdown? How about consumers waking up and realizing the crap that most of the MSM spreads only appeals to sheeple socialists and leftards. And they are showing it by taking their business elsewhere?

  4. Self inflicted. Obviously, the business leadership has not figured out what the problem is – they do more of the same and get worse results.
    Let me make it simple for the management running corporate media into the ground: people need and want information, not an agenda.
    I now have a wager with myself: these declining commercial enterprises will eventually attempt to recast themselves as “cultural assets”, and therefore worthy of “taxpayer investment”.
    Well then, let’s build the drop-in centers and basketball courts for them now, so they’ll be ready.

  5. As an advertiser I am very careful about who gets my advertising dollars and I do not support any of the blatantly left wing mags or newspapers. The problem I have is trying to find ones for my market that are at least somewhat neutral, given that my product is very green. It seems the leftovers like the print media of any kind and swarm to anything green, it makes my spending decisions that much more difficult as some of the best places for me to advertise are very left.

  6. I tuned into Canadian TV news (CTV News) last week for the first time in about a year now. All I can say is that it is even more irrelevant and preachy now than I remember. I was just wondering if anyone here actually watches this crap any more?

  7. Purchased an Eliptical Machine lately – skiing conditioning.
    To pass the time – TV news.
    Elliptical is great, but I usually became nauseous.
    Diagnosed as; Journalist Induced Mental Polution.
    True story.

  8. It’s because it’s all about them, and not the customer. Nor is it about the business they’re purporting to be in.
    An example. For years the headlines have been blaring that we are doomed parish in a global warming inferno.
    In the last couple of years there’s been some serious research showing that is not happening, and in fact the opposite may be the case. And that the Earth’s warming cycles may be attributable to the Sun.
    Yet these very real facts/studies are not reported, misreported, or overtly downplayed.
    Imagine a doctor telling you your dying of cancer, and then he finds studies/does tests that show you’re not. And he deliberately refrains from telling you.
    The new news is that the world may really not be coming to an end (news to those that only follow the MSM), literally. And they bury it.
    Why? Because that’s not the narrative they want to tell you. It makes them have to eat crow, go against their political views, and break the sacred storyline.
    And like the doctor who refrains from telling you you don’t have cancer, their credibility, and hence value, disappears.
    The doctor is somewhat more fortunate in that his pain is over with quickly: his license is revoked, or he’s otherwise disciplined or sued etc.
    The press, they die a slow painful death; one reader, one advertiser at a time.
    I used to be a regular reader of the print media, but I haven’t bought a paper in ages. I read Kate and others like her every day.

  9. What can you do when the big corporations are led around by the nose by the lefties?
    Even Google, that hypocritical outfit that helps China with its censorship program, is sucking up.
    Take a look a Google’s main page today. It’s black, signifying it turned out the lights for “Earth Hour.”

  10. At the Newyorker.com, there’s a 7 page article on the decline of traditional newspapers. Quite a good read.
    Off topic here: slate.com has a new article called “Hillary Clinton Deathwatch” – hilarious!

  12. As many may know, Marshall McLuhan introduced the idea that ‘media is the message’.
    The media took it so literally that now the news is what ever the ‘journalist’ decides, not necessarily actual news.
    So they, the ‘journalists’, have their collective head firmly stuck up where the sun don’t shine, (for those who are going to argue about the impossibility, it’s a metaphor).
    This past week, there was an article, by a ‘journalist’ on the front page of Penticton Herald, the headline proclaimed in the largest possible letters that the city of Penticton is giving the drivers severe stress, because they have to drive around some construction for a few days. These poor drivers are victims of the city of Penticton. The ‘journalist’ never suggested, what’s wrong with the ‘journalist’, that they city of Penticton should have installed a tent nearby to help the motorist with their stressful situation, possibly give them some prozak or something.
    This is what constitutes major news. No kidding.

  13. Slightly OT but Canadian Tire have cancelled their catalogue. The message is out there.

  14. Kevin…I check in to CTV occasionally for the ‘perpective.’
    Just think it’s important to have a perpective on what the masses are being fed, and what they are being told to think.
    I check CBC radio in the car for the same reason.
    So if you see a grouchy driver yelling at the radio it’s not Kate…it’s me.

  16. KevinB ‘s tip, an article in The New Yorker is a good read on the decline of the MSM. by Eric Alterman ;
    http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/03/31/080331fa_fact_alterman/?yrail
    A few groaners though, such as the writer thinking that the Media is biased against Liberals, lol.
    “Three centuries after the appearance of Franklin’s Courant, it no longer requires a dystopic imagination to wonder who will have the dubious distinction of publishing America’s last genuine newspaper.”
    “Perhaps not, but trends in circulation and advertising––the rise of the Internet, which has made the daily newspaper look slow and unresponsive; the advent of Craigslist, which is wiping out classified advertising––have created a palpable sense of doom. Independent, publicly traded American newspapers have lost forty-two per cent of their market value in the past three years, according to the media entrepreneur Alan Mutter.”
    “In the Internet age, however, no one has figured out how to rescue the newspaper in the United States or abroad.”
    “Only nineteen per cent of Americans between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four claim even to look at a daily newspaper.”
    ” Many newspapers, in their eagerness to demonstrate a sense of balance and impartiality, do not allow reporters to voice their opinions publicly, march in demonstrations, volunteer in political campaigns, wear political buttons, or attach bumper stickers to their cars.” (I wonder if he could say that with a straight face ?)
    “Less than one in five believe what they read in print,” the 2007 “State of the News Media” report, issued by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, concluded.”
    ” .. journalism “causes no end of derangement, misunderstanding, and even misrepresentation.” (An understatement, if I ever heard one !)
    “Beyond the publication of the occasional letter to the editor, the role of the reader was defined as purely passive.” (Until the advent of sda !!)
    “Newspapers are dying; the evidence of diminishment in economic vitality, editorial quality, depth, personnel, and the over-all number of papers is everywhere.”
    “The transformation will also engender serious losses. By providing what Bill Keller, of the Times, calls the “serendipitous encounters that are hard to replicate in the quicker, reader-driven format of a Web site”—a difference that he compares to that “between a clock and a calendar”—newspapers have helped to define the meaning of America to its citizens. ”
    Before the Internet, the MSM had a strangle-hold on news interpretation. Now, it is just as easy for us to click on sda and Drudge as it is to click on the NYT and CBC. THAT, is the difference.

  17. Lev: “As many may know, Marshall McLuhan introduced the idea that ‘media is the message’.
    The media took it so literally that now the news is what ever the ‘journalist’ decides, not necessarily actual news.”
    Sorry my friend, but this is one of the most common misreadings of McLuhan’s work. What he meant was that new media (of all kinds – communications, transport, etc.) change the structure of society. For example, I can write here about the Muslims beheading hostages, and most people will feel a mild revulsion. If I showed you a series of pictures, you would doubtless have a stronger reaction. Finally, if I posted a video, you would have a stronger reaction still.
    He demolished the idea that the content is the major effect of a new medium. The message of cars is not the people riding in any one of them; it’s suburbs, the oil industry, and smog. The effect of the internet is not the content of any web page; it’s access to scads of information, the reduction of retail profits (since customers can search and compare prices more easily), and the decline of the newspaper industry. When there were only 3 TV networks in the USA, the message of TV was the creation of mass audiences. Now, in the 800 channel universe, TV has become something different. I trust you see the pattern.

  18. DAMN BUNCH OF EVOLUTIONIST IM GETTING TIRED OF THEIR IDIOTIC MALARKEY IF I HEAR ANOTHER ONE OF THEM CALLING ME A GLORIFIED REPTILE IM GOING TO GET VIOLENT WITH THOSE IDIOTS IM GOING TO PICK OUT THEIR EYES

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