Tuesday 8 September 2009

Short shorts

She's baaaaack. Linda Leatherdale, ousted from her longtime job as Money Editor in December, returns to the Toronto Sun this Friday and Sunday in a Homes-Extra.ca fall new homes and condos preview section. The Sun's Money section hasn't been the same without her.

Legendary Sun cartoonist Andy Donato is on the mend following a hip replacement operation. Andy, planning to be back on the golf course later this month, says he had the "new titanium, 500-pound coil spring job installed, guaranteed to give me a 300-yard drive."

John Paton has joined the Journal Register Co. board of directors. JRC is out of bankruptcy and is now a private U.S. media company. John, who is also chairman and CEO of impreMedia in New York, notes he started at the Toronto Sun as a copy boy a year after the Sun hired Bob Jelenic, who headed JRC before dying of cancer last December.

Confirm or deny: A TSF tipster says all newspaper buildings owned by Quebecor are for sale, with buildings to be leased back to Sun Media if negotiable. "It must make some sort of sense to the company to do that and may save them money, though I don't know how," says the tipster.

Congrats to John Hanley, a freelance photographer, for his latest Toronto Sun fire photo awards. John, 23, has found his photojournalism niche - while still in school - with dramatic fire photos and firefighters are applauding his work. Young, with an eye. Treat him well.

A redesigned front page for all Sun Media broadsheets suck the last of any originality out of the newspapers, says a TSF tipster. "There are boxes on the page where you have to fit everything," says the tipster. "The page will not allow any creativity at all."

6 comments:

  1. Creativity? What the hell is that word? We can't allow such a beast to exist in our newspapers. Why, that might mean hiring someone with talent which could cost more than having cookie-cutter pages done by the Centre of Excellence.

    Creativity. In Sun Media's papers? NEVER!

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  2. I don't know where you guys get your info, but there are a ton of broadsheet dailies that still don't use the standardized Sun frontpage layout. Belleville, Kingston, Peterborough and many of the southern dailies do. I suspect once all the papers get centrally paginated, it will happen.

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  3. Well, not sure where you are getting your information Poster No. 2, but those papers do rely on those PDFs created in the Centre of Excellence for national, business, entertainment and lifestyle sections. Local sections (news and sports) are still done in the home office.

    And the Peterborugh paper began using the Sun frontpage layout, based on the London Free Press desig, in the spring.


    What other standardized Sun frontpage layout are we talking about? It's already ugly with the boxes down the side to promote videos and other senseless Sun crap.

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  4. The papers that haven't gone to the redesigned front pages soon will. The papers will look somewhat like the London Free Press, not like the Sun.
    Poster #2 - information that comes to this blog is usually very accurate. Just wait another month or so and all the papers will look the same. Central pagination will just mean that there will be less editors, saving PKP even more money and benefits.
    It also means with no local control, mistakes will be made and all the papers will suffer

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  5. This is poster #2 again.

    Don't get me wrong - I'm against these changes.
    Hell, they're affecting my job.
    And I know we are all using those centralized national, world, etc... pages.
    My point was that not all Sun broadsheet page ones have adopted the same look - yet.

    I just think it's important for the guys who run this blog (which I appreciate greatly) to be as accurate as possible. How can they smash centralized work for being sloppy, if they don't hold themselves to a higher standard?

    Centralized pagination is a big, big mistake - but it doesn't matter because nothing we write or say is ever going to change that.

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  6. Wow. No one touched the fact the buildings are for sale. Wake up, folks. There are Sun weeklies out there that no longer have offices. Reporters and sales folks work out of their homes. A similar format could be in the works for the dailies, or at least a small storefront operation.
    Let's face it, many of the Osprey dailies no longer have their presses and mailrooms in place. PKP is paying for space no one is using. He'll downsize the office space, or eliminate it entirely.
    Scary thought that papers may not even have offices, but that is a weekly reality in places already.

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