CanWest newspapers seek bankruptcy protection

There were at least a couple of big media stories this weekend.

In the States, the LA Times cut 80 jobs. Read about it in the Digital Journal.

Closer to home, CanWest Global Communications - a media giant - put most of their newspaper business under bankruptcy protection. Well respected papers such as the Ottawa Citizen and the Vancouver Sun are among the papers affected. The new kid on the block, the National Post, is not included in the bankruptcy filing according to a story in the Globe and Mail.

An interesting twist to this story is that this move by CanWest may make the Scotiabank Canada's biggest publisher. Read all about it in the Globe and Mail online.
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This all comes as no surprise to those of us who believe many of the giants in today's newspaper business got there on too much borrowed money and not brilliant media acumen.

I called my take on this whole thing: Too big to succeed. My other post that dove-tails nicely with TBTS is: Michael Moore on the State of Newspapers.

The big question on the lips of many of us, who once worked for media giant Quebecor, is how long till PKP's media mess collapses. One year? Five years? A decade? How deep are PKP's pockets.

A symbolic icon for mediocrity

What makes a newspaper great? And being great is very important today as even great doesn't always cut it and mediocre quickly will be history.

It is the staff.

At the end of the month one of Canada's finest papers, at least it was once one of Canada's finest papers, is again suffering the loss of some excellent staff members - four from editorial and more from advertising. The ones in editorial took voluntary buyouts; the others got pink slips and separation payments to ease the financial pain.

Sue Bradnam, the paper's chief photographer, will be gone by the end of the month. She is a talented photographer and will do just fine but the paper will miss her. Behind the scenes, she was a constant, quiet fighter for her department.

In the new world of the Internet, Sue could have been an amazing addition to the team. She always has neat ideas and with the unlimited room offered by the Web, many of her ideas could have been put into practice. The reality of newsprint, with its set physical size, contained imaginative people like Sue. With the might of Sun Media and Quebecor behind her, pushing her on, supporting her, rather than pushing her out the door, she might have developed a unique but large following for her work. Just think of the ads that could have been attached to her work . . .

Speaking of ads, Jill Worthington of the Special Sections department has been dismissed. The work will be done off site, as I understand it. Now, if we had linked Jill and Sue together maybe we would have created a money machine. A coupling that might have been an Internet dream team, but we will never know.

Editors Tom Bogart and Ralph Bridgland are leaving the paper. Two more editors gone. Fire up the spell check. Reporter Joe Matyas is also leaving after decades covering the news for Londoners. Joe is such a keener about all things web-based that he has actually taken courses in writing code for the Web.

He uses his talents to run his church's website. At one time Joe's code was better than the code being used by The Free Press; I could load Joe's pages quicker than those of the mighty Free Press. The London Free Press is losing a forward looking talent in the loss of Joe.

There is a painting of a newsboy hanging on the wall at the paper. Paul Berton, editor-in-chief, uses it as the icon accompanying his online work. (Paul's unretouched icon at left.)

The painting originally had a rich, black background - not the grey and washed out look appearing on the Web. Maybe Berton is trying to tell us something with his symbolically fading icon. Are you Paul?

Just for fun, I set a black and a highlight for Paul's icon. It took but seconds to give it the rich, punchy look of the original art. What was it that I said about mediocrity at the beginning of this post?

[You don't want to be too much of a smart aleck when you write this stuff. This post corrects an error this old, blogging geezer would have thought impossible to make. A former editor at The Free Press alerted me to my error. Thank-you! I have always admitted that I needed an editor.  )-:  ]

Champion. Made in Canada. Not!

If you haven't read my post on Champion graders, please check it out.

This grader was clearing snow. The Champion name was clearly visible at the back of the unit, along with the words "Made in Canada." The Champion name had quite a run in Canada - over a century - but a month ago the last Canadian made grader was shipped from the plant in Goderich, Ontario, just a little more than an hour north of London. But that grader did not carry the Champion name; It was a Volvo. Read my post on the whole sad Champion story.

Read what the readers of the NYT said about ammonia in beef.

A few years ago The London Free Press reporter Jonathan Sher made us all aware of the amount of lead dissolved in London, Ontario, tap water. At the time I thought, this is why we need newspapers and good journalists.

Now, the New York Times is making me again aware of the importance of newspapers with their investigation into ammonia treated ground beef in the States.

If newspapers ever decide to charge for their online information, I for one would consider buying The New York Times.

If you have read this far but are not sure what this is all about, please read my post asking, "What's in Canadian ground beef?"
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Here is the link to more of the comments on the NYT site in response to their ammonia in ground beef article.

When I read about burger fixings described as: "a mashlike substance frozen into blocks or chips" made of "trimmings 'typically includ[ing] most of the material from the outer surfaces of the carcass' and contain[ing] 'larger microbiological populations'", which have been processed by "turning fatty slaughterhouse trimmings into usable lean beef [by] liquefying the fat and extracting the protein from the trimmings in a centrifuge" I wholeheartedly agree with Mr Zirnstein's assessment of the result as "pink slime."

New Year's resolution: Vegetarianism.
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I realize that most NYT readers may not even know a farmer and I am sorry for you. I have the luxury of raising my own meats on my farm. This article reinforces my reasoning for rejecting the corporate industrialized thinking that has hijacked our food system. Animals and the life-sustaining food they can provide us are no longer treated with respect, only viewed as a commodity. The idea that a silver bullet technology (ammonia, irradiation, whatever) or some government agency is going to make this flawed model wholesome and safe is delusional. You consumers and the animals you eat will continue to be abused until you rise up and demand real changes in the entire system.
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Oh my God, this is truly sick! First they raise the animals in shockingly miserable conditions while pumping them full of hormones, antibiotics, and dirty feed, and then they inject the meat with AMMONIA?!

INSANITY!!!

This only strengthens my commitment to veganism. How any intelligent person can eat this putrid poison is beyond me.
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Some years back, it became popular to say that corporations' only responsibility was to make money for their investors. And oddly, that became some sort of conventionally accepted idea. But that was really a new, and very dangerous, idea: that these private companies owed nothing to their customers/"consumers"; that they owed nothing to their employees; that they owed nothing to their communities or nation.

No one "owes nothing" but to make a profit. The ills that proceed from such a pernicious belief are many, and this situation with our food is one.
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I wish this last person could have a chat with an online editor I sometimes mention who likes to babble on about capitalism. Today's capitalism is not the capitalism that I knew as a boy.

I blogged on this awhile back: Capitalism: the best system?
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Cheers,
Rockinon!

What's in Canadian ground beef?

 Update -- 2019 -- Disney "pink slime" lawsuit settled for whopping $177 million.

From the linked article: "Five years after an infamous ABC News report describing "pink slime" in ground beef created a national uproar, the network's corporate parent Walt Disney (DIS) has settled a defamation case brought by the food company that created the product for more than $177 million, the most ever in a corporate legal case of its kind.

"Meat processor Beef Products Inc. filed suit in 2012 charging that ABC's coverage of its product -- officially called "finely textured beef" -- misled consumers into thinking it wasn't safe to eat."

 The above puts a whole new spin to the story, eh?
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Some time back, the New York Times did a piece on ammonia being used to make meat and fat trimmings from the cutting room floor safe for human consumption. This ammonia treated meat, some call it "pink slime", is used in the manufacture of ground beef in the States. As I read the article I thought, "Is this stuff in Canadian ground beef?"

Add: This post has been hit thousands of times. It is time for an update. First,  pink slime isn’t used in Canadian burgers – this is the word from Health Canada, which says it hasn’t ruled on the product because no one has asked. 

The other name for this product is lean finely textured beef or LFTB. LFTB is made in Canada but it does not use ammonia gas for sterilizing the mix. Read the Canadian Food Inspection Agency regulations for FTB (Finely Textured Beef) or check the chart I've reproduced below

The American product, made with ammonia, may not be being used in Canada but Beef Products, Inc. states quite clearly on their Internet site: "Outside of the US, Beef Products' customers are located in Canada [bold type added], Mexico, and Japan." Maybe it is not the ammonia treated product that is being shipped north to Canada.

One must be careful what one says, especially when the stuff one is writing is being read in Canada, a country famous for "libel freeze" — the filing of libel lawsuits with the goal of silencing critics. As a retired senior I don't need the hassle.

Recently Jamie Oliver made public calls for fast food restaurants to abandon the use of "pink slime." Possibly because of his involvement and the accompanying publicity a number of fast food restaurants have stopped using the product.


A Huffington Post article reported:

McDonald's announced it is no longer using the controversial ground beef additive known as "pink slime" in its hamburger recipe. Taco Bell and Burger King have also reportedly dropped the "slime" from the menu.

So, what else can I add as an update to this post? Well, read what BPI says on its own website. This info refers to meat sold in the States, of course, and not Canada.

"Beef Products, Inc. [is] the world's leading manufacturer of boneless lean beef. . . . "BPI's products are found in the majority of all ground beef produced in the United States. Current production of over 7 million pounds per week, makes BPI the world's largest manufacturer of boneless lean beef in the world. Eating a hamburger from a Quick Service Restaurant or buying ground beef from your local retailer, the chances are you'll be eating product produced by BPI."

Now, read the company description on Hoovers:

"Beef Products, Inc. (BPI) has ground beef down to a science. A top US provider of boneless lean beef, the company grinds more than seven million pounds of meat a week. Its customers include fast-food chains, restaurants, foodservice operators, meat packers, food processors, and the USDA's school lunch program. Its 60-pound blocks of frozen meat chips are used in hamburger patties, ground beef, hot dogs, beef snacks lunch meat, sausages, meatballs, and frozen entrees. The company touts food safety as a priority. It uses two metal detectors to scan beef before and after processing at its Sioux City, Iowa, manufacturing facility. Outside of the US, Beef Products' customers are located in Canada [bold type added], Mexico, and Japan."

Finally, is there any evidence that ammonia is still playing a role in the production of BPI "boneless lean beef"? The BPI site itself make direct reference to the use of ammonia in the  production of their popular product. BPI has an entire section of their online site dedicated to "The use of ammonia compounds in food processing." I had a link to a Canadian producer who used citric acid but the link is now broken.

My wife has stopped buying ground beef. She buys large, intact cuts of beef and grinds them herself, with my assistance. It is easy to do, quick and the final ground beef tastes much better than what we had been buying. Plus, it saves us money! The large cuts of beef sell, on sale, for less than ready-to-use ground beef.

What's wrong with what we eat.

The following is a talk that I found on TED: Ideas worth spreading. I believe it is fine to share this with you as TED supplies embedding code.

Mark Bittman, food writer for the New York Times, gives his views on what's wrong with the way we eat: too much meat, too few plants and too much fast food, too little home cooking about sums it up.

The talk is a little long and has periods where it drags a bit. But, it is a talk given by an adult. I often think that newspapers and the media in general should spend more time being adults. It's fun. It's rewarding.

And it may sell newspapers; then, it may not. But better to go down being an adult than succeed being a Glenn Beck.

Are you knowledgeable or just another know-it-all?

Paul Berton, the editor-in-chief, of The London Free Press recently wrote a piece titled, "Are you knowledgeable or just another know-it-all?"

Yesterday Berton ran a piece on the Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest structure. Paul wrote:  "The Burj Dubai, in the city-state that may be the very definition of excess in a modern world, is finally complete. Stretching more than 800 metres into the desert sky, the office tower dwarfs even the world's second tallest structure, Toronto's CN Tower."

Interesting. Just two things that I'd like to add. One: the building was renamed the Burj Khalifa  in honor of the president of the United Arab Emirates. You do recall that it was the UAE that bailed Dubai out of last year’s debt crisis?

So sorry Paul, but you got the name wrong. (I'm sure you're in good company but a fast Google lap didn't turn up any other news organizations making the same error. But, it is a big world and I am sure you are not alone.)

And oh, the world's second tallest structure is not the CN Tower in Toronto; It's the KVLY-TV tower located three miles west of Blanchard, North Dakota. If you want to play the tallest game, you have to call the Toronto tower the second tallest "freestanding" structure. The freestanding is very important as without that word the CN tower would never have been able to make its claim; The Warsaw Radio Mast was hundreds of feet taller but it was a guyed affair and not freestanding.

Oh well, look on the bright side. You can do another column in the are-you-knowledgeable-or-just-another-know-it-all vein and you can take a more generous and forgiving approach this time. Your view will now be tempered with the wisdom of someone who has been-there-done-that.

Maybe, just maybe, you should have kept those editors you let go at Christmas.