TV is dead. Long live the news company?

The death of a small-market Manitoba TV station is an opportunity for a newspaper -- and a test of how serious it really is about transforming itself into a virtual medium.

CKX in Brandon (pop. 40,000) is not worth even $1, a couple of media companies have decided. So it's off the air.

Remember when TV was going to put newspapers out of business? Didn't quite work out that way.

Now the Brandon Sun, the established local daily newspaper, is free to hire a bunch of the dumped journalists and other employees and set up a killer local-news website that would make Western Manitobans forget CKX. All it takes is money, a bit of brains and a lot of will.

The Brandon Sun is owned by the Winnipeg Free Press. Disclosure: I used to make my living at the Free Press, and I still write occasional book reviews for it.

On Oct. 1 Margo Goodhand, editor of the Free Press, told first year students in the Creative Communications program at Red River College, "We aren't a newspaper. We are a news company." I am going to count her welcome statement as an entry in my campaign to rename newspapers, getting rid of the p-word.

Will this news company, whose sales of its dead-tree edition are plummeting, embrace the future and set up a great local news site for Brandon?

Because somebody will.

Body of writing, bawdy of work

An emaciated body and emancipated, lush bodies: themes of two writers featured at the Winnipeg International Writers Festival Sept. 20 to 27, 2009.

In the scary graphic novel Tyranny Lesley Fairfield gives the skinny on eating disorders, based on her 30-year struggle with anorexia and bulimia. Her sane, quiet bottom-line message to students and other book-lovers at Red River College: "I got well."

On the other hand, the raunchy (if not raucous) George Elliott Clarke covers corporeal excesses. Check out any of his books, particularly his latest, I & I.

Long poem? Verse novel? Whatever. Here's a taste from page 72:

The lovers laugh, get loose, snuggle.

Each sugars each sweetmeat sex.

(Betty's "hot," caramel-licorice wiggling

Summons Malcolm's molten satisfaction.)

All this, and funky footnotes, too.

Footprints on the waves

One important difference between the information tsunami and the watery one is what each leaves behind.

The sea wave destroys everything it touches, but the electronic flood does the opposite. It preserves everything.

Killer@Craigslist, a fascinating article in the October 2009 issue of Vanity Fair, lays out the evidence.

Last April a woman and a man met cute (actually, mercenary, not cute) in Boston. They hooked up through ads on Craigslist. The woman died and the man was charged with murdering her. Police made the case by following the cyber footprints of their communication.

Dear reader, you live a much more virtuous life than anyone Vanity Fair writes about, I am certain. So you don't need to worry about where your cyber footprints lead. Right?

Attention must be paid to these ideas

Published Sept 12, 2009 in The Globe and Mail, a reputable Canadian news organization, is this readable summary of the situation in which the information tsunami is leaving us: information-rich and attention-poor.

Lots of implications for everyone within the sound of my voice (as the radio preachers used to say). Of special interest for teachers, journalists and other ex-experts.

Interesting comments, for once, on the Globe and Mail site.

Trying to make a killing, again

A Canadian provincial government wants to seize the proceeds from the sale of a book by convicted wife-killer Colin Thatcher.

I say you should decide whether Thatcher makes any money -- not the Saskatchewan government.

You should decide whether he collects a couple of bucks from his tortured retelling of the case, and his literally incredible insistence that he didn't murder JoAnn Wilson.

If you don't think so, then don't buy Final Appeal: Anatomy of a Frame. You will be in good company as you let this flotsam wash past you in the information tsunami.

Thatcher was convicted of killing Wilson in 1983. He appealed, but the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal told him to take a hike. So did the Supreme Court of Canada.

That's guilty, guilty, guilty.

Now that he is out on parole, who cares if a couple of hundred people fork over $35 for his book? That's a couple of hundred people who will see through his delusions of innocence.

It is highly unlikely his book will hit the best-seller lists. This angry author will not get to make a second killing.

But let the readers decide whether the book should live or die.

That's a better chance than Thatcher gave JoAnn Wilson.

D-I-V-O-R-C-E, 2009 style

Check out this outrageous claim:

“In this spirit-numbing information age, we gorge on the Web and on CNN, we cannot free our hands of our BlackBerrys and laptops and cellphones, but, in the end, we know less and less of each other, of our hearts, of our souls.
But Johnny Cash singing I Walk the Line or Hank [Williams] sorrowing through I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry still gives us more insight in three minutes, tells us more about what matters most in our lives, than we get in an entire 24-hour news cycle.”
– Sing Me Back Home: Love, Death, and Country Music by Dana Jennings, Faber and Faber 2008.

Is the Web more up-to-date than Webb Pierce? Has Google supplanted George Jones? Or is Jennings (an editor with the New York Times, by the way) just a country hick?

Down with the P-word! Let's rename newspapers

Newspapers need a new name.

The news part is OK, although perhaps unnecessary. But the paper part is dragging them down.

Dead trees, yuck!

The best newspapers are learning to compete online, using their large editorial staffs to research and present interesting material in a compelling way.

Most of them still publish a dead-tree edition, too. But I don’t know many people who think ink on paper is the future.

(Except my old boss. In 1995, when I was editor of the Winnipeg Free Press, I worked with Red River College and journalism instructor Donald Benham to create a Web site that incorporated text, audio and video. We demonstrated it in the IMAX theatre and impressed lots of folks. Then, when I got back to the office, the publisher ordered me to stop wasting the newspaper’s money and time on this Internet nonsense. But I’m not bitter.)

So let’s dump the P-word. No more paper in the newspaper.

What better word can we create?

And I’m open to suggestions for prizes for the best new name.