Today on the Scroll: While the decision to pull vending boxes off the streets of Toronto — along with ceasing daily distribution in Manitoba and Saskatchewan — gave the impression during its 10th anniversary week that the National Post was ready to die, word that its mastermind Conrad Black (pictured, sort of) was seeking a pardon and/or clemency from George W. Bush before he leaves office in January made it to the pages of another paper he used to own, the Chicago Sun-Times.
The suggestion contradicts past reports that Black already ruled out seeking any such reprieve in favour of a US Supreme Court appeal.
Would this mean that the Post is being kept on life-support specifically in anticipation of Baron Black of Crossharbour’s release from prison? The notion that all the broadsheets Hollinger International sold off to Canwest in 2001 are being held by the debt-riddled media company in anticipation of his return may therefore not be as far-fetched as first thought.
Black used his latest weekend space as the Post’s jailbird opinion columnist to observe that America has become too confused about everything economic to make a clear-headed choice in the presidential election: “A centre-right country is running some risk of a quirky and ill-starred lurch to the left under its first non-white president,” he wrote. “Whatever else it may have become, the United States is a land of surprises.”
And now, eight months into a 78-month prison sentence, he apparently awaits the opportunity to become a surprise himself.
Following a series of decade-anniversary retrospective pieces devoid of all the bluster with which the National Post began — a Rebecca Eckler self-parody was a pretty tepid attempt to play off the rambling self-absorption of a long-gone columnist savaged online a year or two earlier — the newspaper announced the demise of the weekly Toronto magazine section that provided an outlet for the television listing grids. As these things tend to work, the news of its closure garnered more attention online than the actual effort did.
What the money spent on that stapled supplement appears to have been reallocated to, however, was a national Weekend Post section evidently designed to revive the analytical lifestyle writing that got lost somewhere in the past half-decade of Canwest management — even if the fees paid for original pieces are a far cry from the original era when it served as the ATM for a freelancer welfare program. There’s even an alt-comics page. Contributors include Philip Marchand, abruptly shuffled from literary columnist to movie critic at the Toronto Star in January, only to soon depart altogether, striving to revive that recently endangered species: newspaper books coverage.
Writing about reading is yet another topic whose diminution — the Toronto Star cut their Sunday books section in mid-summer around the same time the weekend Globe and Mail insert quietly took a couple of weeks off — draws wider interest than the actual reviews ever did relative to recommendations on Amazon, or better write-ups originating elsewhere.
So, from the National Post, an ultimatum: buy this weekend newspaper ($2.50, whether or not you can find a box) or we’ll make you read this blog (e.g., Full Comment, increasingly stoked with agenda-leaden posts originating from no-overhead sources like the Blogging Tories).
Lord Black might have a few better ideas?
scroll@eyeweekly.com