The monthly food budget is back!

It's late and I'm going to bed. But first a quick note. We spent too much at Christmas and my wife is on her monthly food budget kick. She says she can get through the month on less than $150 for the two of us. (She may have a harder time this year as I've already bought some organic ground beef. It was sold by folk who had never heard of Cargill and I liked that.)

It looks like I'll be eating a lot of stuff like the pizza on the right.

Cheers,
Rockinon.

The LFP, Sun Media and Quebecor are letting down the team.

Media companies like The London Free Press, Sun Media and Quebecor love to take credit for the work they publish. I think we can all understand that, but in truth the publisher only publishes. Without the work of an excellent staff, they would have nothing. Their presses would sit silent.

I think it's a safe bet that Pierre Karl Peladeau knows nothing about Robert Vanier and Onco, nor should he. PKP's job is to supply the best possible paper in which to bundle the news. The actual news is the responsibility of the thousands of journalists toiling daily for him in the trenches.

At this point I had to look up the special report on the ex-Onco boss. I went to The London Free Press online page and found nothing. This story is yesterday's news and so is no longer anywhere on the homepage. Not a mention. Not a link. Nothing.

Oh well, I typed "onco" into the search field and got the result shown below.

I clicked on the first linked page. I immediately found myself back at today's Free Press homepage, the one I had just left, the one with nothing on Onco. I hit the back button.

I clicked on the second link. I noted that this link appeared to take me to: http://www.lfpress.com/home.html. I thought this is going to take me right back to today's homepage; The one with nothing on Onco. I was right. I hit the back button.

I clicked on the third link. I noted that this link appeared to take me to: http://www.lfpress.com/news/london/2010/01/08/12397921.html. This took me to another Chip Martin story but not the Special Report. I hit the back button.

This time I looked for a link with special report in it. I found it. This looked good. This must be the link to Chip Martin's Special Report on Onco.

Nope! I got a special report on school cash shortages. I clicked on the big blue words "Special Reports." Nothing. I clicked on "Full series." This gave me the full series on the high cost of school incidentals.

I gave up.

Which bring me right back to my original premise. The publisher provides the wrapper for the news. If they provide a great wrapper - an enticing wrapper - one that attracts readers, then they are doing their job and can take a small bow.

So far our publisher is failing miserably. But, this is online. As Dan Brown the senior online editor at The London Free Press likes to point out this is a stodgy old company with its feet placed firmly in the past. I'm sure they do better with their old paper product.

Well, hold onto your money - unless you're about to bet against the house. The Free Press is not doing much better with their paper wrapper. Take the comics.

Starting late last year the comics started appearing as grey on grey rather than black on white. It was very hard to read the dark grey words printed on a dark grey background. The paper got complaints.

At the end of December a letter to the editor said about the change, "I have poor vision and it is very difficult for me to read them now. It's not clear to me (pardon the pun) why you would make such a change."

Days later the paper was still running these hard to read comics. A St. Thomas reader wrote in to say, "I'm not a senior yet but I had been skipping over some of my favourite comics because they were just too difficult to read."

But the comics are not all The Free Press can't print.

Check out this image, right, from the London paper.

To save money, certain news pages are being done centrally by Sun Media in their Centres of Excellence and delivered electronically in a press-ready state to all company papers. Some of the pictures are no more than black rectangles on a page.

My guess is the pictures are being prepared for publication by a computer running some automatic image toning software. I ran tests on some software for the paper years ago. The results looked horrid - rather like the stuff now being run by the paper. On the plus side, a publisher can use this software and reduce the payroll by laying off some expensive pre-press people.

Chip Martin did his job. He supplied the paper with a great story. The kind of work that sells papers and keeps the citizen journalist wolves at bay. He can take a bow.

My premise for this post was: Newspapers are a cooperative effort with news the main driver behind the success of a paper. Reporters, like Chip Martin, supply the paper with the all important quality journalism. No journalism; No paper. In return, the newspaper is supposed to supply Martin with a professional looking paper in which to package his work.

Martin is keeping his end of the bargain.
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Since writing this the London paper has gone back to printing the comics with the usual contrast. The comics are again legible.

And the bright pictures that accompanied Martin's story - why so bright? My guess is the staff at The Free Press did the toning for those images.

A really funny commercial_Do these come as dual-flush?

This ad from Europe is a few years old, you may be familiar with it if you keep abreast of popular stuff on the Web. Me? I just saw it for the first time the other night and thought it was quite witty and would like to share it with you.

(My wife wasn't as positive as I. She thought the little video made snorting coke seem glamorous and everyday all at the same time. She wasn't sure if it was only promoting clean toilet seats. She saw a subtext)

Oh well, can't please everyone. Wonder how this has influenced sales?

Cheers,
Rockinon


Cheers,
Rockinon!

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!