Not Waiting For The Asteroid

Nobody reads the paper I buy a daily maybe once a month when I have time to kill. Brilliant young lady.

zowie Batman...

Why would I bother with the paper?
The stories are superficial pap. They contain as much editorial content as the editorial page. The facts are usually mighty scarce. No one at the newspapers seem to understand that who, what, when, where, why and how are some things that need to be in the stories. You know, FACTS.

I am sick of financial stories that say Profits are up 40%, energy costs are down 23%, etc., with no context. Forty percent of what? 40% of $20,000.00 ain't impressive, of it is a $10 million dollar comapny. 40% of two milllion might be impressive. But they will cover the soap opera or human interest aspects in great detail. Joe's a great guy and his mom overcame cancer last year. Sorry, but how does a 85 year old mother's cancer affect his ability to be a 60 year old CFO?

But do not worry, these experts at the newspaper also bring great logical insights like the company's two year old gender awareness and diversity program is responsible for the company's 5 year record of growth.

Where the newspaper could excel is in bringing us facts and background, and letting us make our own conclusions. It is boring stuff, unlike TV. Instead the average story is written with the same depth of facts as a 60 second TV newscast story, minus the immediacy, minus the photos, minus the graphics, but with the same layer of biased, non-objective editorializing and the same lack of facts and context that I hear on the news.

Instead I skip the paper and the TV, and use Drudge and a few websites (Like SDA) to let me know what is happening in the world. And I do my own research.

The newspapers have done this to themselves. They stopped being about reporting the news and started being about spin for their favourite political parties. You know the how each paper is going to slant any given story so why read it. I also stopped watching the news on television for pretty much the same reason except they all slant towards the same party.

This includes radio as well. If you want superficial fluff just listen to 680 CJOB out of Winnipeg. If your a cutter I advise against it.

I've got an idea! Why don't newspapers start charging the hugely wealthy pop culture industries (movies, TV shows, music, pro sports)for all the endless promotional puff pieces they give away for free. All those big articles on that wonderful new movie that's coming out? That movie's actually a stupid waste of time and money, if the truth were told...

Well said Chris S. !

The internet is the death knell of daily newspapers, particularly as public opinion shapers.

And SDA is the Death Knell of of "progressive" bloggers and blogging.

Well done Kate McMillan!!

Its a hard and painful lesson, but the young lady should take it in stride and be thankful she is young enough to change career paths. Journalism is not a choice anyone with any self respect should have to choose. Leave now and make a better career choice. You can only go up from journalism. You may even be allowed into polite company again.

Chris S, that is the exact problem with most journalists, they want to so bad have their person win, they forget their job. Here in Alberta we have a talk show host that is so in love with the oppositions "positions" he's forgot that the business of the province should come first, he used to have a fairly good talk show, but is has now devolved into newspaper style attacks everyday, trying to ruin someones life, because you want your way, it has become the driving force behind most media. "Lets see what fight we can start today", that is the medias new motto. After staying at a motel, having the continental breakfast with only the Nat Post and Glob to look at I concluded the world needs far more canarys and budgies.

Well, it’s getting expensive to subscribe when you are retired. So you buy it now and then, Friday & Saturday.

The thing is, if it is a newspaper, you want to read the news.
Of course the “journalists” have to justify their existence by making sure that you don’t get the whole story due to omissions, interpretations and plain ignorance. What you get is more of an opinion of the “journalist” than the news.

You would have to read two or three papers every day to get the real story. Even then it may be difficult due to the fact that all the “journalists” went to the same school with an ideology that predetermined the correct narrative.

The young lady that wrote the piece went of the narrative and got clobbered.

Is that a surprise?
Really?

Full honor to those that do not follow the narrative.

The problem for newspapers is their apparent tin ear when it comes to considering their readership. Take for example the issue of crime. Even many of those on the left are tired of seeing criminals given a slap on the wrist for the serious shit that they're getting away with. You would never guess that when you open a newspaper. Our MS newspapers have been four square behind the courts as they erect road blokes to parliaments attempt to do something about crime.

As I'm sure Kate can attest, commercial art has had a major sea-change these last ten years. In conversation with a few commercial artists of late I hear that their incomes have dropped by about half, due to changes in the way art and advertising are commonly done. Thanks mostly to the internet and computer graphics, large graphics companies have laid off their stable of artists and most work is done freelance and by piecework.

Or so I hear, I'm certainly no expert.

Point being, there is no great hue and cry about the poor starving artists and their way of life being threatened.

Journos, well that's different. Endless gnashing of teeth bemoaning the fact that un-certified non-professionals like [gasp!] Kate McMillan reach as many or more eyeballs in a day than the National Post or the Toronto (Red) Star.

Meanwhile, where do I find out that the Ft. Hood shooter has suffered a misadventure? SDA.

Journos all over are having trouble getting that the public conversation has moved on. We don't agree with their world view, and selling people something they don't like and don't want is not a growth business.

May an asteroid fall upon their car while they're at work. Silly b@st@rds.

I do still remember when Conrad Black first started printing the National Post. I was already pretty disillusioned with Canadian media after years of NDP rule in B.C., but the first year of the NP was an incredible experience. Watching the unions ilegally, and unsuccessfully, trying to block delivery of newsprint to the local printing presses and the anhilation of the G&M on the west coast was a treat.

Unfortunately the NP was sold and it morphed into another Canadian rag filled with unionized, left-wing hacks reiterating the party line. I cancelled my subscription about two years ago.

We get the Times Colonist (Victoria) at work - it's like reading something from a different planet. Every couple of days it runs a puff-piece on Andrew Weaver and his noble attempts to save the planet, but not a peep about his (and Micheal Mann's) SLAPP against Tim Ball, the warming cartel's most vocal Canadian critic. It would be interesting to find out where the funding for this SLAPP is coming from since Weaver works for the taxpayer. You can bet information on this won't come from the local media...

"it's like reading something from a different planet"
That is so true. We all had the hard line socialist teacher back in 9th or 10th grade. It's like those writing in the paper took to heart all that crazy stuff from back in grade school and that's how they write today.

Good for Stefanie Cutrona.

rd and Chris S, exactly and well said.

We need to take a good long look at the journalism schools in this country. Part of the problem is that the graduates in the last couple decades have been under the impression that it isn't enough to just report the news they have to shape it as well. They've had to have learned this somewhere.

Another factor is the sheer laziness of most reporters. Research seems to be a foreign concept to most of them. If they can't the quote they want from a phone call or an email then they just don't bother to do anything else. Heaven forbid they go to a crime scene when they can stay at their computer and just send a photographer.

Can you imagine what Edward R. Murrow or Walter Cronkite would say to the current crop of journalists.

The young student told the truth and she got hammered. Nice people on the left.

TC
Agreed. I cancelled my subscription to the NP too after the post took a severe left turn.

It was about 40 years back when Dad didn't renew the local paper. When they raised their rates...that busted it.

He found the paper was no longer filling in the details radio/television ommitted and contained the same lies. I had matured beyond reading the comics.

Classifieds could be consulted by buying a copy at the store when some need arose.

The rural mail courier was releaved by the reduced load....it wasn't just us.

Radio was something just listened to in the car/truck/tractor.

Chris S. at September 25, 2012 10:42 AM
"Can you imagine what Edward R. Murrow or Walter Cronkite would say to the current crop of journalists."

Well.... Cronkite would probably approve. I put him and Jane Fonda into the same category.

sasquatch, you are probably right but I can't help but remember him as the last of the honourable journalists. It could just be because he had such a cool voice. :)

I gave up on papers as a source of accurate news almost a decade ago - even then I used to by a paper about once a month or so to peruse the classified ads, but with Job boards online and online buy and sell like Kijiji and ebay, who needs the local classifieds?

Anyone who gets their news from a broadsheet paper or an alphabet network is being indoctrinated, not informed.

So she doesn't read the paper? Lovely. Problem is, she reads the same filth the papers cough up on her favourite blogs.

My child, the world does not need another liberal journalist trying to save it, on line or off it. Our Lord gave man and woman a means to be saved---repent, make amends for their sins as best they can, and not sin any more. Man and woman need to go do that. They have the Law, the Prophets and the Gospels to guide them. Let them listen to them. You have nothing to add.

What you need to find a good Christian man with a honest job and start a family, because you'll need someone to change your diapers when you're far from being 19 any more, and it won't be the Winnipeg Free Press.

Call it an educational experience. A few years of trying to figure out how to use what your husband brings home to keep a hungry child fed, the rent paid and the lights and water on will teach you, if anything could, that the only thing in the liberal media, on actual paper or on-line, that isn't a pack of lies is the Sudoku puzzle.

Oh, my child, you will love paying huge sales taxes at the grocery store after income taxes have taxen a quarter of your husband's pay, if you're lucky---never mind that you'll also be paying your landlord's property taxes through the rent.

You'll also help pay the interest on the landlord's mortgage, which, of course, will go right into the pocket of Toronto bankers. The taxman, of course, won't see much of that money. You tell the taxman to stuff it, you go to jail (which is as it should be, by the way). The bankers tell the politicians to stuff it and stop lending to them, the army deserts or mutinies and the politicians go to jail. So, the bankers get what they want---a life of luxury with little real work involved, plenty of cheap help and delicious exotic cuisine thanks to mass immigration, and plenty of pocket money to spend on yachts, trophy wives and monuments to their own vanity like "human rights museums." You'll get to pay for it all.

You'll be paying for Muslim thugs to live on the pig's back on welfare, unfit for any work more taxing than calling you a harlot in the street, and you doing nothing but passing by trying to get home with your baby. Your taxes will also permit you to enjoy the privilege of having fat, lazy government employees swan past you in the street on their two-hour lunch break with five-dollar coffees in their hands at your expense.

Did I mention that if there's a problem with your husband's taxes that you'll be paying for him to be condescended to by a French Canadian half-wit who can barely speak English well enough to order dinner in a cheap Chinese restaurant on rue Ste-Catherine, never mind discuss tax law---but for all that gets a month's vacation in Cuba every year on your dime?

When was the last time the Free Press talked about any of this? When was the last time your favourite free weekly or news blog did? Or was it too busy shouting hurray for the carres rouges in Montreal, heavens to Betsy, if only we were half as hip as Montreal?

Trust me, after a few years of living in the real world I don't doubt you'll have plenty of ideas for something worth reporting on your blog. It'll have to be your own blog. Nobody in the respectable media has space to print the grievances of decent people.

When you have something to report worth writing, I look forward to referring it to Kate in the reader tips.

Moby Dick Nutter: " Our Lord gave man and woman a means to be saved... They have the Law, the Prophets and the Gospels to guide them. Let them listen to them. You have nothing to add."

Caliph Omar on the destruction of the Library at Alexandria in the 7th century: "Touching the books you mention, if what is written in them agrees with the Book of God (Koran), they are not required; if it disagrees, they are not desired. Destroy them therefore."

I always felt Shakespeare was a bit redundant, myself. Who did he think he was, writing stuff when there was already a bible?

On topic: newspapers are a security blanket for the old and the left-wing. Otherwise they're dying. Journalists haven't been doing a decent job in decades, and anyway journalism isn't a profession. I will be happy as a clam when the NYT goes under.

T.C.- couldn't agree more with you on the NP. I cancelled my subscription some years ago, but I do get a free copy at work, when it is delivered. Last week they had a piece by Scott Stinson on the life and career of George Stroumboulopoulos! WTF? Of course the Van Sun and Province are just little sisters, mostly about entertainment and fashion types that I find truly boring. And the price now, is just not worth the entertainment value.

1979, just the beginning

Mr. Gardiner, Sorry to persist, but it would be of great interest to me to know what newspapers you do read.

Chauncey: I do not read any newspapers. I watch TV.

I can't believe we are so carried up about a first year student writing a story. We have a nhl lockout which is more important. We also have replacement refs in the nfl which is going to cause a riot if not fixed. Come on people those are the real issues here.

Yes, T.C. it was quite a thrill seeing the launch edition of the NP in the newspaper box in Vancouver.

And sitting in a bar-restaurant in a national park in Alberta with a Pinot Grigio or 4, laughing my fool ass off over -- who is this guy anyway??!!! -- a Mark Steyn column on Tom Jones. A brief and glorious age!

And how can I ever forget being ACCOSTED by a denizen of Tofino BC who, seeing me pick up a day-old National Post at the gas station, proceeded to energetically upbraid me for my subversive act.

I got a similar thrill at the launch of Sun News Network but truth be told I already had most of what I get there at 6am that morning. Not my wife though who eschews the internet.

I can't afford to read newspapers. The last time I read a newspaper it was a Blubb and Wail article on Jack Layton.
I promptly donated $300 to the Conservatives (was it pure chance they called that day?).

The Canadian Free Press is an excellent scource of news, at this link:
http://www.canadafreepress.com/. As SDA has proven again and again journalism is not dead; it has moved.

The local fich-wrap is an AP reprint service. No reporters, maybe 2 editors.

That crap I can get anywhere.

Oh, and they raised their price when circ dropped.
Not seeing the logic there, guys.

"when one technology supercedes another, the older technology becomes an art form."

It already is. We call it Propaganda.

As for Stefanie Cutrona. She should have started her own Blog by now if shes this honest, plus a good writer, she has a great future.
Take a tip from Mark Steyn.
I get all my news from Blogs like SDA. Not only are the subjects consistent with realities of the day. You get the added bonus of real professionalism, adding their thoughts to subjects they actually work at.
I eskew TV for its almost violent bias on every channel. A snake eating itself.with an airless bubble of none sense disguised as Informed opinion
Other blogs just add supplemental Info, if not enhance your data gathering. I find it fun as well doing my own digging.
Blogs are fast, based mostly on real evidence, by real people Not political motivations only. Those it has a plenty, but they are not the Ideological imperative as it readers come in all hues. Hence flame wars. Its not perfect , but 100 times more accurate than papers or TV. Besides you can compare, really compare the stories with different shades of though. Not so with the monotone Media.

I read our local fishwrap only at work. According to this rag, Obama is doing a great job, the climate is in peril, and electricity and oil are luxuries we can live without.