Sunday, November 01, 2009

None dare call it "welfare."


Oh, dear:

Court OK's new National Post ownership structure

An Ontario court approved a new ownership structure for the National Post on Friday, heading off the shut down of its operations.

Owner Canwest Global will be allowed to shuffle the newspaper into a group alongside its other daily newspapers, a move it said would be the best hope for saving the paper from going under.

And how exactly is that going to save the Post? Oh:

Canwest has been restructuring under protection from its creditors and had asked to put the money-losing Post into the Canwest Limited Partnership — which is not among divisions of the company currently operating under creditor protection — in order to save cash.

In short, other Canwest operations that aren't losing money will be forced to prop up the financial money pit that is the Post. Huh. How ironic -- the screechiest, most right-wing supporter of unabashed capitalism and the unfettered free market in Canada, crawling hat in hand to its sibling newspapers for a handout to keep it from going under.

And given how much Canada's Blogging Tories are down on that whole welfare thing, one would expect them to be absolutely outraged by this latest socialist development. One would be wrong:

How fitting that on Halloween, the National Post rises from the dead to walk the earth once more to torment the unenlightened masses of moonbats. It's great news simply from a media diversity POV. We conservatives are sick of the unabashedly leftist, Trudeaupian drivel coming from most of the other rags in this country, ...

Here's a thought, Mike ... if those "unabashedly leftist, Trudeaupian" media outlets are still around and financially viable, while the relentlessly right-wing Post is tanking, doesn't that tell you what the market wants? I thought that's what you conservative dingbats were all about -- survival of the fittest, let the market decide, you know, that sort of thing.

Canada's Blogging Tories: Because welfare and socialism are only bad things some of the time.

9 comments:

Noni Mausa said...

You know, I wondered about the NP from its inception, simply because of a lot of its distribution choices. To name two:

- Remember those very fancy newspaper boxes they rolled out onto the streets, the ones that looked like they were cast from granite? Pricey, I thought at the time. Not around anymore so far as I can tell.

-- and also from the "trying too hard" department, they made deals with places like hotels that they would get free morning NP papers, so long as it was the only national newspaper the hotel provided for its guests. (Local rags were still okay.) That's why I stopped having breakfast at the Holiday Inn near my work -- nothing to read.

double nickel said...

The NP hasn't been available on the Prairies for a couple of years now, so it's hardly "national" in scope either.

Ti-Guy said...

and also from the "trying too hard" department, they made deals with places like hotels that they would get free morning NP papers, so long as it was the only national newspaper

No kidding. Travelling in Alberta became hellish because of that.

liberal supporter said...

The court only approved it after Raphael Alexander finally blinked. You see they were concerned about the NP having to cover RA's payment of damages to Dr. Dawg. They just couldn't afford ONE HUNDRED MILLION millicents.

Metro said...

Why in the name of bog are they so desperate to preserve, and continue to shovel money into the furnaces of, a national paper without a national audience?

Why not just call it the Calgary Post and go with that?

And yes, I'm sure the Zombie Post will continue to be as wretchedly unreadable as previously except for John Moore.

Ti-Guy said...

Why in the name of bog are they so desperate to preserve, and continue to shovel money into the furnaces of, a national paper without a national audience?

Corporate media activities at this point (and this includes the CBC) are nothing but a game. These people see the writing on the wall. The Internet will become the sole mechanism for delivering content in the very near future at which point, the business model and the basis for competition is going to look very different than what obtains now. They're just scrambling now, to place themselves in a slightly better position than their competitors and hope they'll survive the transition into the ultimate convergence.

No print product will survive, that I can guarantee. It just doesn't make any sense anymore, especially given the advances recently in portable devices. I always said the book, the newspaper and the magazine will disappear when we have something like them for digital content. And we're getting close to that.

The best we can do is make sure we pay them as little as possible in the meantime and hope the changes come sooner rather than later.

Don't pay for any corporate media content as much as possible.

Unknown said...

Ti-Guy is right. But, it is harder to read the netbook on the can.

Romantic Heretic said...

For now.

Metro said...

@Wayne:
What, you don't have a Candle?