N. Y. Times on "the newly relevant Daily News"

Excerpt:

"A designer set the phrase over a pair of photographs of Mr. Trump and Ms. Palin, pointing at each other. The image was soon rolling off the presses in New Jersey and going viral on Facebook and Twitter.

"It was the latest in a series of attention-grabbing covers that have shifted the conversation around the struggling paper. Just a few months ago, after an aborted sale and sweeping layoffs, The News seemed to have completed its devolution from the model of a big-city tabloid to a battered symbol of the diminished state of America’s newspapers. But the recent string of covers, which were all widely shared on social media, have sent a very different message — if not about the paper’s long-term financial prospects, then at least about its continuing cultural relevance."

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Thunder Bay Could Lose Both Its TV Stations, 'Blackening Northern Ontario'

 

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Thunder Bay’s two local TV stations are in such financial trouble that they are running on life insurance money from a recently deceased station owner, station management told Canada’s broadcast regulator this week.

The CRTC is holding public hearings into the future of local TV in Canada, and local broadcasters are taking the opportunity to bring attention to their growing financial problems.
Thunder Bay’s two local stations — CTV affiliate CKPR and Global affiliate CHFD — are both owned by Thunder Bay Electronics, also known as Dougall Media. The company’s vice-president and general manager, Don Caron, says the stations may have to shut down by Sept. 1, Global News reports.
 

Canada’s national fabric is paying price for depletion of journalistic resources: Chantal Hébert

Excerpt:
"But there must be a point when the steady disintegration of the country’s fifth estate’s news-gathering and news-getting functions becomes a public policy issue.
"There will be some to actually rejoice in the notion that a shrunk news media will have less potential for digging out embarrassing stories. The corruption inquiry in Quebec and the sponsorship scandal on Parliament Hill both had their source in persistent journalism."
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Print Is dying, digital Is no savior -- WGBH story

Twenty years ago this month, The New York Times entered the Internet age with a sense of optimism so naive that looking back might break your heart. “With its entry on the Web,” wrote Times reporter Peter H. Lewis, “The Times is hoping to become a primary information provider in the computer age and to cut costs for newsprint, delivery and labor.”
The Times wasn’t the first major daily newspaper to launch a website. The Boston Globe, then owned by the New York Times Co., had unveiled its Boston.com service—featuring free content from the Globe and other local news organizations—just a few months earlier.
But the debut of NYTimes.com sent a clear signal that newspapers were ready to enlist in the digital revolution.
Fast-forward to 2016, and the newspaper business is a shell of its former self. Far from cutting newsprint and delivery costs, newspapers remain utterly reliant on their shrunken print editions for most of their revenues—as we have all been reminded by the Globe’s home-delivery fiasco.
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Cabinet won't overturn CRTC ruling allowing Oprah Winfrey network to broadcast in Canada

The federal cabinet has sided with the country's broadcast regulator to allow the Oprah Winfrey Network to continue broadcasting in Canada, a decision that could have far-reaching implications for television stations and content producers struggling to survive an ever-changing media landscape, the Canadian Press reports.
The order in council, issued Tuesday, comes as the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission holds hearings on the future of local TV.
The ruling upheld a 2015 CRTC decision that allowed Corus Entertainment Inc. to amend its broadcasting licence so it could keep airing programming from U.S.-based OWN Inc.
In the wake of that decision, a group representing Canadian TV producers petitioned the government, accusing the CRTC of abandoning critical safeguards designed to protect independent producers in their dealings with the country's largest private broadcasters.
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