Up Next? Ottawa Citizen Closes
In the world of diminishing journalism resources, we give you the Ottawa Citizen.
Your agent’s old employer doesn’t have the troops to keep up with the news. It’s really starting to show.
On one page in Saturday’s online edition in a feature called Up Next, the Citizen tells readers that the Queen has died. And she did on Sept. 8, 2022. That’s more than up-to-date than the three-year wait for OC Transpo to find the root cause of one major derailment on Aug. 8, 2021 so there’s hope.
Also in Up Next are some Today in History features for July. And a municipal panel giving a post municipal election analysis of the last municipal election in 2022.
The Citizen is not alone in this. The Globe and Mail sometimes has badly outdated news in its down-page headlines. No doubt that is to do with automatic computerization of online news.
Still it looks bad. The Bulldog comes up with an error or two in its aggregated news but we try to correct them. This Up Next feature kicks around for days.
You can’t keep cutting staff and content (stretching resources too thin so you get lousy stories) yet expect to hold your readership or, God forbid, increase it.
If this continues, Up Next will feature a story “Ottawa Citizen Closes” but it will be two years late.
Someone should tell someone at the Citizen that the strategy of cost-cutting isn’t working. It will lead to only one sorry conclusion. Somehow, the Citizen must reinvent itself to respond to changing times … or die. It’s not a matter of ‘if’, but ‘when.’
If you think turning the newsroom into a roller-skating rink was bad (and it was), wait until they shut the whole place down. That will be very sad.
Ken Gray
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News…some will not read, watch or listen to it…but hey, it’s a democracy. One’s uninformed opinion based vote will cancel out your informed opinion.
It has taken me some time to get used to this factoid and though disquieting I live with it.
Today I read blogs, turn to Twitter , social media that I have come to trust, go with my instincts, I write, try to promulgate and generally impress others.
But as we say nobody thanks a doomsayer…in fact they will club you to death in your tent as Bezos said. So the trick is to sugar coat things or put them in a comic book.
Good luck.
Technology is transformative. It changes our culture in many ways. Consider the rise of the automobile and the demise of horse drawn carriages. The Internet is bringing profound changes to advertising, to merchandising, and the way in which information flows around the globe. More and we are living in a “now culture”.