Monday, January 12, 2009

Is This The Sun's Future?

A TSF reader snapped this gathering of freebee boxes at Yonge and Finch, steps from a TTC entrance. Is this the Sun's future? Free for the taking to pump up circulation figures for the advertising dollar?


There is nothing wrong with free, but don't expect a commitment to competitive local news coverage.

This was posted on January 8th. Tellingly enough, though, on the 9th a commenter wrote that "it was still full today".

Meanwhile, 24, the Sun's free counterpart, which everyone has assumed is making money, appears to be having problems of its own (click on picture left for clarification).

3 comments:

Ti-Guy said...

I cancelled my Globe subscription last year and a week a ago, they called and offered me a year's subscription for half price. And I still turned it down. The Lifestyle section just drove me nuts.

They're all suffering and that makes me happy.

George said...

If given a choice to keep only one newspaper, it would be the Globe and Mail, hands-down.

It's the paper with the highest quality of reporting and language (they all have typos, which I all find, since I read my papers from cover to cover every day, but if you look at the National Post, for example, you're tempted to believe they've already tossed the spell-checker to save money).

Ti-Guy said...

That's just lowered expectations.

I just wasn't reading 3/4 quarters of The Globe anymore, most of which struck me as inane. Inventing news for the sake of reporting it without any editorial perspective that would indicate any understanding of public interest.

I can find any quirky or novel human interest story I need, free, over the web (in fact, a lot of the reporting in the Globe increasingly just struck me as having required no greater effort than a couple of Google searches). The content I'm going to pay for will have to be lot more original and better-researched.

The daily newspaper is on its death bed and the corporate media has no one to blame but itself for spreading itself too thin in a highly competitive environment of products people, in the end, are just not prepared to pay a lot money for.