Hang in there until we fire you

“Daddy, what are spapers? It says here that new spapers are dying. Are old ones dying, too? I googled it and it asks, ‘Do you mean papers?'”

Heh. Just practicing writing dialogue. Gonna need a new writing career because there aren’t many left in journalism these days. Today we have this: Winnipeg Sun: Postmedia buys Sun Media for $316M

Quebecor today announced the sale of its English-language operations, consisting of 175 publications including the Sun chain of dailies, its community dailies and weeklies, its Canoe portal in English Canada and its Islington printing plant, to Postmedia Network Canada.

The quotes in the story are just typical business boilerplate bullshit and there’s more of it in the tweets below the main article, used to update the story.

Antonella Artuso, Queen’s Park Bureau Chief for Sun Media, offers this: “We have no plan to close anything,” CEO Paul Godfrey says, when asked about jobs.

There’s something of a disconnect here. Either Godfrey didn’t answer the question, or the question wasn’t about jobs. If the question was about jobs, then it should have been something like, “Is anyone going to be fired or laid-off?” And if that’s what Godfrey dodged, she should have reported that. You can keep an office open with only one employee where there used to be 100 and you can claim you haven’t closed anything.

A previous tweet: “Sun newspapers will live side-by-side with Postmedia papers in major markets but no question digital is the future, CEO Paul Godfrey says.”

Translation for employees: “Hang in there until we organize a clickbait department of twentysomethings who can hunt down funny videos of cats and dogs in clothing and then we’re going to can your ass. It’s not like you have other options.”

I have been practicing my clickbait writing; “OMG! You won’t believe what happens next” though I see that bait like this is getting old, unsophisticated, over-used. People are catching on, so we have to move on. It’s probably better if I aim higher for language more precise, complicated but still cute and bait-y on many levels, like this: Rescued Pit Bull Vies for Taylor Swift’s Job in New Video.