I’m no fan of the Sun chain and all its works, but I’m sort of fascinated by the Toronto Sun Family blog, which specializes in bring-out-your-dead-style daily casualty lists of editorial employees fired, resigned or laid off that day as the chain collapses. The latest casualty is John Downing, who as an editor closed the last edition of the Telegram, and I’m sure has been being a sentimental blowhard about it ever since.

They’re not big fans of Quebecor, to put it mildly, but whoever was in charge, I don’t think the Sun’s business model could have survived the stresses on it. 1) is that there don’t seem to be enough non-immigrant largely male newspaper-reading Anglophones with limited reading skills and at least some tolerance of redneck politics to float a daily newspaper any more; 2) is that the subway tabs eat their lunch, for obvious reasons; 3) is that they forfeited their stake in a potential ESL reader market because of their politics.

TMQ knows more about this sort of thing than I do.