Sunset
Posted by gigantichound on 19 Apr 2007 at 06:18 pm | Tagged as: Toronto
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.
I’d never really thought about the possibility of immigrant readers being turned off because of the politics. That strikes me as being extremely unlikely — while there might be very high patterns of Liberal voting among immigrant groups, that has to do with good political organization and long tradition rather than any match-up in values… exactly why the federal Conservatives think they’re ripe for the picking.
The Sun was always a commuter paper and doesn’t offer home delivery, so once the tabs were launched it seems like a pretty clear one-for-one swap.
I’d never really thought about the possibility of immigrant readers being turned off because of the politics.
I heard this fairly frequently when I worked for GTA Today, enough for it to be a pattern. It was less party-political and more that a lot of their ESL readers were tired of their being cranky about immigration and aggressively uncritical of the police. Mind you,we dumped bales of GTAT on ESL classes all over the city, which didn’t hurt.
Ah yes, crankiness about immigration could be a bit of a turnoff to new Canadians. I still think it’s basic economics though — let’s see, I can buy a tabloid-sized newspaper with easy-to-read articles on my way to work, or I can pick one up for free. What’s the advantage of paying for one again?