Oh Canada

The latest talk from those paying attention to what's going on at The San Diego Union-Tribune is that the Copley paper is being sold to the Black Press of Canada, a rather large - and apparently healthy - publishing company that owns more than a few (dozen) newspapers in Alberta, British Columbia, Hawaii, Washington and Ohio (including the Akron Beacon-Journal). Black Press sightings are everywhere, along with a potential partner. Why, just the other day, a few Canadian suits were said to have been spotted on a grassy knoll just outside the paper's Mission Valley headquarters.

I'll believe it when an announcement is made. Over the past few weeks, "sources" inside the newsroom have told other news(?) organizations that massive layoffs - a major bloodletting! - would come the next day, then the next, then the next...yet nothing has been announced. Yet.

I'm at the point of being too busy to care. With a staff reduced by several rounds of buyouts and layoffs over the past two-plus years, there's more than enough to keep me occupied. If the Black Press becomes my future employer, more power to them. They'll get what I've given every employer since I landed my first job selling programs at Dodger Stadium in 1975: The best effort money can buy - at an economical price.

....Meanwhile, I've gotten a lot of feedback from a recent posting on how silly it was for newspapers to spend millions of dollars producing a product, only to give it away for free on the Web. New York Times editor Bill Keller addressed the issue in gawker.com, a New York-based blog, validating my point.

Writes gawker:
So here's what newspapers need: some collective action. What if, say, the 100 biggest papers in the nation all started charging for online access at once? That would make it much harder to track down quality news for free. People happily paid to read newspapers before the internet came along. Then newspapers started giving away all their content for free, and now people think that it should be free. But if a paper's website can't pay its own way through online advertising, and if it doesn't somehow bolster print ad revenues, then it has to charge for access. It's common sense. Millions of extra online readers are nice, but if they don't bring in more money than they cost you, they're no good for the paper.

Couldn't have said it better myself.