12:08 on 2012/07/21 Reply  

• qatzelok 19:48 on 2012/07/21 Permalink

  Actually, the article is about the decline of “print” Anglo Quebec media, which has been crap for the last 40 years anyways.

• Kate 19:49 on 2012/07/21 Permalink

  Not only. They talk about the loss of TSN 990 radio.

• qatzelok 19:51 on 2012/07/21 Permalink

  Commercial radio is unbelievably shitty and advertisement-saturated. If I was a lab-rat, and my scientists made me listen to commercial radio, I’d try to scratch my way out of the maze. Why do so many people volunteer to listen to it?

• Kate 19:52 on 2012/07/21 Permalink

  Because they want the nuggets of information or entertainment embedded in the matrix of commercials, I guess. I’m not a listener myself.

• Ian 20:05 on 2012/07/21 Permalink

  “Henry Aubin, a prizewinning longtime urban affairs columnist at The Gazette, says older readers “are not digitally oriented” and the loss of the two free weeklies and the cutbacks and staff shrinkage at the Gazette “are blows to the Anglo community’s ability to inform itself.”” Yeah, because so many older readers were into the Mirror and the Hour. Bullschnitt! In any case, Montreal’s English news media has been a bad joke for ages, no real news here.

• Kate 20:24 on 2012/07/21 Permalink

  I worked in the Gazette newsroom for awhile in the 90s. The bulk of the work was done by page editors whose names you don’t hear but who were, all of them, sharp people, really on the ball. But the paper’s culture was so devoted to dumbing things down for the “older, less digitally oriented” reader – the little old lady in Côte St. Luc, basically – that the paper was already dooming itself not to expand its readership. Then the internet came along.

• Ian 20:49 on 2012/07/21 Permalink

  If I’ve learned nothing else from User Interface/ User Experience design, (UI/UX) I’ve learned this: If you make a product that will appeal to the least savvy target audience, it won’t appeal to anyone else. It’s true now, and it was true then.

• qatzelok 20:58 on 2012/07/21 Permalink

  “Henry Aubin is a journalist at the Montreal Gazette and the author of The Rescue of Jerusalem: The Alliance between Hebrews and Africans in 701 BC. ” http://www.henryaubin.com/

  Although he’s a mediocre writer who knows and cares nothing about Quebec, his resume provides some useful tips on how to get a lucrative job in mass media.

• Ian 08:57 on 2012/07/22 Permalink

  Always looking for a chance to remind us of your racist conspiracy theories, eh qatzelok? Aubin may be a hack that “knows nothing” of Quebec, but apparently you know nothing of the world -beyond xenophobia, that is.

• qatzelok 10:11 on 2012/07/22 Permalink

  You’re right, Ian. I’ll never get a well-paid media job with this attitude.

• Hamza 11:21 on 2012/07/22 Permalink

  ‘then the internet came along.’ hah

• david m 20:57 on 2012/07/22 Permalink

  it’s a continuation of the conversation we had a couple days ago, about the inevitable march toward a full francisation of quebec, but with an interesting twist. one imagines that had napoleon ordered his troops differently, his forces might well have won the day at waterloo. and in the same vein, one imagines that if the anglophone media had been more interesting, if the gazette had gone about producing a devoir level of quality, standing alone as the paper or record in either language, they’d have developed a healthy francophone readership. it’s just such a shame it’s come to this. the anglophone plutocrats in this town used to stand for something! well, hopefully, without the feedback loop of aubin-style darkest doubts affirmation, we’ll be a more interesting gang.

• Kevin 13:14 on 2012/07/23 Permalink

  If the Gazette was written like Le Devoir it would already have vanished.
  Le Devoir distributes 30,000 copies a week. The Gazette hits 550,000 people.

• Jack 13:43 on 2012/07/23 Permalink

  Le Devoir can be read between two Metro stops, its reporters and editors hold exactly the same political line and their is pathetically little diversity of opinion.Frankly, except for the weekend edition, its boring. I still think of a bad bunch La Presse is a better model of what Quebec is.

• Kate 13:44 on 2012/07/23 Permalink

  Le Devoir has to share its potential audience with the populist Journal and the wide-ranging La Presse. The Gazette tries to be folky like the Journal (badly and embarrassingly, often), generalist like La Presse, but it doesn’t aspire to the kind of razor-sharp critical thinking Le Devoir does at its best and its attempts at any kind of wit are feeble.

  But the Gazette doesn’t want excellent content because it’s come to believe that it will scare off the West Island commuters that it feels to be its target audience. They try for beige, and they get beige – and now they don’t even have to compete with the Mirror. (I excuse from this critique the investigative work of Linda Gyulai and a few others – it’s the cultural stuff and the editorial tone that get me down.)

• willie granger 22:41 on 2012/07/23 Permalink

  I don’t want to fling mud too much but yeah, um.. Henry “Two doors down from Jean Charest” + “Can’t stand noise and must wear earplugs when he takes the bus to work” Aubin has very much had his day. I am thinking he’s not helping matters out much at the Gazette.

• Kevin 07:29 on 2012/07/24 Permalink

  The Gazette is a mass market newspaper that has to appeal to beauticians/guys on the warehouse floor/clerks/office workers/dentists/accountants.

  That said, my main critique of the Gazoo is that it’s often a day behind the news cycle, and tends to react to events and scoops rather than lead it.

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