SAINTS PRESERVE US

Stop the Presses! Please.

The fourth estate, an objective, free and tactile press, is a pillar of democracy. Therefore, paid display advertising must be its plinth. Things have changed.

I remember watching a CD-ROM demo on my work station’s brand-new Apple computer (a confusing and intimidating upgrade from my IBM Selectric typewriter, set of Letraset font sheets, clip art, ruby tape, hot wax and blue pencils) that explained how the Internet (a proper noun back then) worked. It was, I don’t know, some overly sophisticated arcade game, a Star Trek upgrade to radio waves and television signals. A telecommunications step forward provided you had a machine to access it. A visual medium underpinned by print, the Internet would simply be another magazine, a compendium. I couldn’t grasp the difference between analogue and digital. How could I?

Slide rules are clever, elegant instruments. I could never get the hang of them. God bless Texas Instruments for their calculators which I found difficult to employ beyond their grade school arithmetic functions. My essential advertising production tools were a little more primitive. Two newspaper-branded rulers: one for broadsheet publications which displayed column widths in inches, centimetres and picas (a printer’s measure) and another for tabloid formats. Tabloid papers scale their type horizontally on vertical broadsheet newsprint, so four pages become eight. One display ad becomes two, completely different dimensions. This arcana really matters as deadline nears. Time is always too tight to massage panic.

When I eventually broke into the advertising industry, I was beyond ecstatic. No more grimy sweatpants on the midnight shift. Work became more interesting even if the negative dynamics of my new job were no different from my old one. Other people. If you’re on a career path, man, you better be engaged. Over time I became aware that some of my practical skills – shaky expertise with an X-Acto knife – had become utterly useless even as the fundamental theories of producing a good advertisement remained constant. While the message remained, the means of production and methods of delivery were transitioning. Digital disruption is something akin to encroaching floodwaters. You can sandbag it for a time. It seems like a little extra work, a little extra hassle, but everything will be preserved as it was, damage minimal. A a carpet to replace, a little paint, an insurance claim. Then the big surge comes and everything you’ve known is scoured away.  

Yesterday’s papers used to drop on doorsteps like editions of the Yellow Pages or perhaps cinderblocks. There were special sections on certain days: Tuesday fashion, Thursday careers, Friday real estate, Wednesday automotive. “Thanks to St. Jude for favour received” classifieds always. Weighty weekend editions were stuffed with features and inserts: flyers, television magazines, colour comics.

Last Saturday’s Edmonton Journal print edition (an increasingly crucial distinction these days) dropped on the Crooked 9’s front porch as skimpy as its Monday edition except that the Journal no longer publishes a Monday edition because nothing happens anywhere over a weekend. The Journal, a broadsheet, was once the newspaper of record in Alberta’s capital city. Its sports section (24 August) consisted of four pages tucked away at the back of another section. There were 14 stories in the sports section, one of which was a four-sentence cut line beneath a photograph of a golfer searching for her ball in the rough at the British Women’s Open. Other stories were datelined Japan, Netherlands, Czech Republic and United States. The Canadian stories, just three, were out of Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver.

Sports doesn’t matter in the great scheme of things; it’s just another form of leisure distraction, ultimately meaningless. We all know this. But it can be an interesting diversion from hard news. I also know that here in my town last weekend the U Sports University of Alberta varsity teams were gearing up; I know that the professional football Elks are no longer a community-owned club; I know the hockey Oilers are in a twist over salary cap issues; and I know there is talk of the baseball Riverhawks jumping a level from the West Coast League. And I assume some Albertans, perhaps even a few Edmontonians, will be competing in some capacity in the Paris 2024 Paralympics. If your big city daily is incapable of covering local sports, not one jaded reporter on the beat, you’re compelled to wonder about more important stuff, city hall and civic issues. Just how slack is my newspaper’s coverage? There’s only one conclusion.

The Edmonton Journal is a Postmedia property. Postmedia is a national newspaper chain (providing integrated multi-tiered advertising platforms that blah, blah blah …). It remains the financial hostage of an American hedge fund (Chatham Asset Management) that squeezes out cash in the form of endless interest payments with the indifference of a hungry boa constrictor. Wall Street loan-sharking. Regular people visit the pawn shop or skip town. Struggling corporations hollow themselves out – always the core (editorial staff and capital assets such as printing plants in Postmedia’s case), never the incompetents in the executive suite. The next step was a plea for government welfare, because, fucking hell, the corner office never saw the paradigm shifting.

Advertising is a simple game: a compelling message delivered to the widest target audience by the most effective and cost-efficient means available. And the advertising industry is the same as the porn industry in that any upgrade to an existing medium or, even better, the creation of a new one, can make it better. Bang for your buck. The internet provided cheap space in a popular place while continuing to refine its reach. Location, location, location. At the same time, a funny thing happened on the way to the digital chat forum.

Newspapers such as The Edmonton Journal began posting exclusive content, traditionally paid for in part by subscribers and casual newsstand readers, for free on social media in exchange for a “Like” and a “Share.” Whatever the initial free-for-all spirit of the internet, there was no value proposition there for an entity that sold curated information, be it news or advertising (advertising can be helpful information you never sought out). The aftermath is Ottawa’s Bill C-18, the Online News Act. Postmedia lobbied hard for the new medium to subsidize its publishing of its same old story, the song and dance being the threat to informed democracy – this from a media corporation (its name is now ironic) shilling irrelevant content. Google complied. Meta (which owns Facebook) refused, rightfully arguing that it’s a mere platform for all kinds of shit and not a publisher, subsequently blocking all Canadian news from its sites. Advertisers sided with Meta.

Postmedia last week completed the purchase of SaltWire Network, an insolvent chain of newspapers in Atlantic Canada. Cuts to editorial staff were instantaneous. Why shouldn’t a failing company buy a bankrupt one? Makes sense. Postmedia is now the proprietor of unread newspapers from coast to coast. And now let’s cut to the chase or a journalism crime – a very wordy lead: An incompetent and failing newspaper corporation beholden to American financiers and propped up in part by Canadian government regulations extorting cash from American tech companies has reinvented itself as a near monopoly and a paragon of local journalism. Something’s got to give.

There’s got to be a better way. Postmedia must die and not just palliatively, its death must be hastened. Rip out Ottawa’s IV tube and snuff it with its own pillow. Something else will take its place. I cannot imagine what that, or they, may be, but people whose mission it is to competently inform other people who demand to be properly informed will find a way and make it pay. Advertisers will follow. Content is a draw, a lure, a reason to read. The death of Postmedia doesn’t mean the death of journalism.                 

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. My companion site www.megeoff.com is a little dusty, but up to date.