Media giant Readers Digest has hired a firm of lawyers to explore restructuring and possible bankruptcy, reports Bloomberg. The corporate web site of Reader’s Digest Association Inc. calls it “a global multi-brand media” with offices in 45 countries, products reaching 130 million households in 79 countries, 92 magazines including 50 editions of Reader’s Digest (which…
Tom Hawthorn explores the crisis in journalism with a profile of Vancouver native John Temple, editor of the American Rocky Mountain News, which closed this month. An excerpt from Hawthorn’s Globe and Mail piece: “A newspaper is dead five days now, and still the publisher speaks of his column and his staff and his newsroom…
The Tyee has a round-up of the status of lawsuits Canwest launched in response to a parody of the Vancouver Sun. Not a lot of humour is evident.
Expect the press-rights case of Globe and Mail reporter Daniel Leblanc — who is ordered to appear in Quebec’s Superior Court to testify about a source in the infamous sponsorship scandal — to make news in coming weeks. Noted a report in the Globe, “Groupe Polygone, one of the companies alleged to have over-billed the…
Access to Information is broken in Canada. OK, ok, nothing new about that. But there is a new report, some attempts at explanation, and plenty of blame on the failure by the current government (the Stephen Harper Conservatives campaigned on accountability) to fix the system while at the same time plugging casual information channels.
“Democracy needs dialogue more than it needs bumper stickers,” writes Stephen L. Carter, a novelist and Yale law professor, in a persuasive essay arguing for more context — more thoroughness — in journalism. The piece is American, but applies elsewhere.
[Note: This post has been updated] “The CBC is heading toward a new fiscal year with little clarity about its funding from Ottawa, even as it suffers a projected 2008-2009 shortfall in ad revenue of up to $65-million,” reports the Globe and Mail.
Even those of us who care about news and newspapers can become cynical about the wailing over the demise of print. Fortunate then that Paul Starr has written a passionate and thought-provoking argument in The New Republic for why all of us should care.
Under his own byline, News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch apologized for an editorial cartoon run by The New York Post showing a police officer telling his colleague, who just shot a chimpanzee, “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.” Wrote Murdoch…
Crawford Killian sums up the demise of media, on The Tyee blog, The Hook.. His warning is spine-chilling…