On the move!
Agh! You’re still here? My new site and weblog, ianking.ca is now up and running; new posts are building up over there, never to be mirrored here. Go! What are you waiting for? All the stuff worth keeping has been migrated over to the new server, and I don’t anticipate making any more posts here.
Bloggers and webmasters: Update your links! Simply replace vancouverscrum.blogspot.com with www.ianking.ca in your blogrolls or bookmarks to point to the new site. Old posts will remain on this server for as long as the people at Blogger/Google allow them to remain; unfortunately, I’m not going to bother to come up with any way of converting permalinks on this blog to their corresponding posts on the new site. Yes, I plead laziness. I also realize the irony of switching away from Blogger just it starts to add features that the demanding blog nerds insist upon.
Thanks for reading and linking, and see you over at ianking.ca!
—Ian King, December 13, 2004
Saturday, May 10, 2003
The continuing National Post saga is providing endless inches of copy -- and to think that I haven't updated here in a while (too busy or drunk to bother, thanks.) To recap the last few weeks:
- April 24th: The Asper family, Overlords of CanWest Global Communications and owners of the Post, announce that while the paper continues to bleed money (somewhere between $15-million and $25-million annually, depending on how you work the numbers) they are not going to kill the thing or strip it down to its Financial Post core.
- May 1st: The Aspers fire founding editors Ken Whyte and Martin Newland. Publisher Peter Viner slides over to CanWest's new jazz station in Winnipeg; he is replaced with Bob McKenzie, known for his axe-wielding past at the St. Catharines Standard. Rye High prof and right-wing suck-up Matthew Fraser, who hasn't been a reporter or editor of any sort for nearly 15 years, becomes the new editor. Post staff are devastated or start looking for new jobs; the chattering classes wonder what to make of the changes. While there is some sort of chatter from CanWest about a three-year plan to turn around the Post's fortunes, they announce no definite steps to move the paper's books into balance.
- May 3rd: Lucky Sperm Club luminary David Frum quits the paper in protest over Whyte's firing. Whines about horrrible left-liberal hegemony in Canadian media. Nobody outside conservative circles cares.
- Rumours surface that Christie Blatchford is contemplating her future at the Post. She's still there -- for now.
- May 8th: Parliamentary columnist Paul Wells gives the Posties his notice. This is a bigger hit: Wells was one of the few writers at the Post who was neither partisan nor predictable. His columns are also wickedly funny. Wells is rumoured to be joining Maclean's... now, will Wells do an ad for Macleans pontificating about how you read voices in Maclean's, while all you get in most newspapers is the news? (Odd -- I thought that one read papers for the news)
- Sometime that same week, Post managing editor Alison Uncles announces that she's leaving to take a slightly more junior position over at One Yonge Street -- the despised Toronto Star!
- Queen's Park correspondent Bob Benzie and foreign reporter Marina Jimenez also leave, to the Star and Globe and Mail respectively.
- Mark Hume, formerly the Post's Vancouver bureau chief, moves to the Globe and Mail Vancouver bureau. The move leaves the National Post with only two full-time reporters in British Columbia, compared to the Globe's ten.
- Some blogger/media columnist in Vancouver wonders what the hell is going to happen next, but is rather pleased that the continuing turmoil means that he's got lots of ready-made material.
Of course, the Post is rushing to its own defence, assuring everyone that the rumours of their demist have been greatly exaggerated and blah blah blah. Apparently those who are still left (all 21 of them) are also taking issue from all the analysis of the Post's troubles from their former colleagues now slaving away for the Post's gleeful competitors. Financial Post editor Terence Corcoran, formerly the author of much stale invective in the Globe's Report on Business, shot back in a letter to his old home last Thursday. Corcoran thinks that the critics are all wrong, and that those who complain of a lack of moderate voices in the Post since Patricia Pearson's departure should check out "Paul Wells, Mark Kingwell, Anne Kingston, Don Martin and Jonathan Kay." Oops. That letter ran a few hours before Wells went bye-bye; Kingwell appears once every other week (about one-eighth as frequently as, say Andrew Coyne); Kingston comments mostly on social and cultural matters, leading the politics, diplomacy, and economics to the Post's still-strong cadre of neo-conservative armchair generals; and if Kay's a moderate, then I'm a goddamn Marxist.
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