{"id":90,"date":"2014-10-06T13:40:11","date_gmt":"2014-10-06T17:40:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/yusipka.com\/?p=90"},"modified":"2017-06-15T13:11:01","modified_gmt":"2017-06-15T17:11:01","slug":"hang-in-there-until-we-fire-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/yusipka.com\/?p=90","title":{"rendered":"Hang in there until we fire you"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;Daddy, what are spapers? It says here that new spapers are dying. Are old ones dying, too? I googled it and it asks, &#8216;Do you mean papers?'&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Heh. Just practicing writing dialogue. Gonna need a new writing career because there aren&#8217;t many left in journalism these days. Today we have this: <a title=\"Winnipeg Sun: Postmedia buys Sun Media for $316M\" href=\"http:\/\/www.winnipegsun.com\/2014\/10\/06\/postmedia-buys-sun-media-for-316m\" target=\"_blank\">Winnipeg Sun: Postmedia buys Sun Media for $316M<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The quotes in the story are just typical business boilerplate bullshit and there&#8217;s more of it in the tweets below the main article, used to update the story.<\/p>\n<p>Antonella Artuso,\u00a0Queen&#8217;s Park Bureau Chief for Sun Media,<a title=\"Twitter: Antonella Artuso\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/suntooz\/status\/519138916805668864\" target=\"_blank\"> offers this<\/a>: &#8220;We have no plan to close anything,&#8221; CEO Paul Godfrey says, when asked about jobs.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s something of a disconnect here. Either Godfrey didn&#8217;t answer the question, or the question wasn&#8217;t about jobs. If the question was about jobs, then it should have been something like, &#8220;Is anyone going to be fired or laid-off?&#8221; And if that&#8217;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&#8217;t closed anything.<\/p>\n<p>A <a title=\"Twitter: Antonella Artuso\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/suntooz\/status\/519137978921545728\" target=\"_blank\">previous tweet<\/a>: &#8220;Sun newspapers will live side-by-side with Postmedia papers in major markets but no question digital is the future, CEO Paul Godfrey says.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Translation for employees: &#8220;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&#8217;re going to can your ass. It&#8217;s not like you have other options.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I have been practicing my clickbait writing; &#8220;OMG! You won&#8217;t believe what happens next&#8221; though I see that bait like this is getting old, unsophisticated, over-used. People are catching on, so we have to move on. It&#8217;s probably better if I aim higher for language more precise, complicated but still cute and bait-y on many levels, like this: <a title=\"Rescued Pit Bull Vies for Taylor Swift's Job in New Video\" href=\"http:\/\/news.yahoo.com\/blogs\/odd-news\/rescued-pit-bull-vies-for-taylor-swift-s-job-in-new-video-185623101.html\">Rescued Pit Bull Vies for Taylor Swift&#8217;s Job in New Video<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;Daddy, what are spapers? It says here that new spapers are dying. Are old ones dying, too? I googled it and it asks, &#8216;Do you mean papers?&#8217;&#8221; Heh. Just practicing writing dialogue. Gonna need a new writing career because there aren&#8217;t many left in journalism these days. Today we have this: Winnipeg Sun: Postmedia buys&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7Q4T3-1s","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":106,"url":"http:\/\/yusipka.com\/?p=106","url_meta":{"origin":90,"position":0},"title":"Four Strong Winds","author":"Kevin Steel","date":"October 8, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"Keystone to the south, Gateway to the west, and now Energy East. All we need now is a proposal heading north. Maybe a Mackenzie Valley Pipeline in reverse. Oct. 8, 2014, Bloomberg: Keystone Be Darned--Canada Finds Oil Route Around Obama","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Linking, not thinking&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Linking, not thinking","link":"http:\/\/yusipka.com\/?cat=12"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":138,"url":"http:\/\/yusipka.com\/?p=138","url_meta":{"origin":90,"position":1},"title":"No apology necessary&#8230; this time","author":"Kevin Steel","date":"October 17, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"My old boss Ezra Levant (former publisher of The Western Standard, where I worked as a senior writer) can be really on-again, off-again with his show The Source. Recently, he went overboard-off-the-deep-end with criticism of Justin Trudeau and his family after Trudeau kissed brides or babies at some wedding. But\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Linking, not thinking&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Linking, not thinking","link":"http:\/\/yusipka.com\/?cat=12"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":232,"url":"http:\/\/yusipka.com\/?p=232","url_meta":{"origin":90,"position":2},"title":"&#8220;Quarrels with our past selves&#8221;","author":"Kevin Steel","date":"January 29, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"This past weekend Link Byfield, my former boss at the Alberta Report, passed away. I remembered him in a previous entry here, after his illness was publicly announced. My former colleague Colby Cosh now does the honors: Jan. 26, 2015, Colby Cosh in Maclean's: R.I.P., Link Byfield Excerpt: My impression\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Media&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Media","link":"http:\/\/yusipka.com\/?cat=13"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":299,"url":"http:\/\/yusipka.com\/?p=299","url_meta":{"origin":90,"position":3},"title":"Itsy Bitsy Part 2","author":"Kevin Steel","date":"November 18, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"First order of business; my title, Ma valise mal a l'aise, passed the French test of someone who knows the language much better than I. I was told it's an unusual pairing, forcing the adverb\u2014mal a l'aise\u2014to be an adjective and modifying an inanimate object, putting the \"ill at ease\"\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Memoir&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Memoir","link":"http:\/\/yusipka.com\/?cat=11"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":430,"url":"http:\/\/yusipka.com\/?p=430","url_meta":{"origin":90,"position":4},"title":"The #Wexit thing","author":"Kevin Steel","date":"October 25, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"I signed up for Twitter yesterday. Following our Oct. 21 federal election, after seeing the outpouring of anger from Western Canada, I wanted to post a copy of the Feb. 19, 2001 Alberta Report cover story Alberta First: Six prominent citizens deliver a manifesto calling for provincial autonomy, by Kevin\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Politics&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Politics","link":"http:\/\/yusipka.com\/?cat=24"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":377,"url":"http:\/\/yusipka.com\/?p=377","url_meta":{"origin":90,"position":5},"title":"Math blame, from general to the specific","author":"Kevin Steel","date":"June 18, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"This article by David Staples in the Edmonton Journal, about dropping math test scores here in Alberta has kicked up some dust locally. Everyone is pointing to something called Discovery Math, which I don\u2019t know much about, and trying to figure out who to blame for implementing it 20 years\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Linking, not thinking&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Linking, not thinking","link":"http:\/\/yusipka.com\/?cat=12"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/yusipka.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/cropped-yusipka-site-icon-72-300x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/yusipka.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/yusipka.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/yusipka.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/yusipka.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/yusipka.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=90"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/yusipka.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":97,"href":"http:\/\/yusipka.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90\/revisions\/97"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/yusipka.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=90"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/yusipka.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=90"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/yusipka.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=90"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}