Pride goeth before a fall.
According to Grant Robertson, media reporter for the Glob and Blame, Toronto’s National Newspaper of Record, the Toronto Stun (that little newspaper that coulda, shoulda) is fading. Fading fast:
In 1995, the Toronto Sun had an average weekday circulation of roughly 250,000 copies. By 2000, that number had fallen to around 200,000. And this year, it sits at around 182,000. Held up to the rest of the industry, that 27 per cent decline in the span of a decade is staggering. Toronto’s four daily papers are all worried about competition from the rise of the Internet and free commuter newspapers, but the Sun’s dramatic losses have caused management to unleash a torrent of changes — including a recent round of layoffs — that have left staff worried about the future of the paper.
Actually, we like the Sun. We know people who work there and we know people who have worked there in the past. We hear for the writers and editors it is less of a snakepit than most of the Toronto dailies.
But now the paper is stumbling. Is is the “Nearly Naked Newsgirl” formerly found on page two? Is it the communist-leaning commentary of the editors and columnists?
Or–gasp–is it the car advertising found everywhere throughout, starting on the front page?
You know what we think it is. The Sun has been corrupted from within: automobilious corruption has set in, and until it is purged, the paper is a goner.
Two paragraphs near the end of the Global Male story told us everything we need to know about where, why, how, who, and what is happening to the Toronto Sun:
The union representing Sun employees is now launching a Save our Sun campaign that will ask members of the newspaper’s core readership to write to Mr. Lee and protest the consolidation and cutbacks.
On the list are fire halls, restaurants and the General Motors plant in Oshawa, the Sun’s largest single customer, buying a few thousand papers a day.
The Toronto Sun, famous for bikini-clad enchiladas, now faces a crisis: its biggest customer is a dinosaur and facing extinction.