(As read via my e-mailed Market Opener from globeandmail.com@email.globeandmail.com)

Cost-cutting Torstar tries to reassure shareholders

GRANT ROBERTSON
Globe and Mail Update

“A day after the management shakeup, newly appointed Star publisher Jagoda Pike told employees that no major cuts were being contemplated. Nor is the company looking to kill Star P.M., a downloadable paper launched last month.”

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20061017.wtorstarr1017/BNStory/Business/?cid=al_gam_nletter_maropen

(Maybe Jagoda Pike is monitoring your blog!)

It was great to finally meet in person last night, Joe. Thanks again to Thornley Fallis for sponsoring an informative and interesting session with Mathew Ingram, plus to Ed Lee (of FH), et al. for making all of the arrangements.

Relieved to hear that the printed word is welcomed in La Casa Thornley. And hmmm…for that matter, I think I’m going to be checking out *your* hands tonight, for any traces of newsprint or PDF file ink….

BTW, coverage on the Torstar shake-up in today’s *print* Report on Business section (Globe and Mail), “Struggling Torstar shakes up executive ranks,” speculates on a whole host of underpinning troubles for this large conglomerate (e.g., its Harlequin Books division, amalgamation of publications into the Star Media Group, Bell Globemedia, etc.), but offering a PDF file version of The Star—although mentioned as a recent “initiative”—wasn’t highlighted as one of the problems. (Online version of the article available to subscribers only.)

To wit: “It’s clearly a reflection of the lack of progress in trying to turn around the fortunes of the Star, said Adam Shine, an analyst with National Bank Financial Inc., in Montreal. “The issues have to relate to finding the right strategy to stem the [advertising] linage bleed, compete against the free commuter papers, and other media, in particular radio and the Internet, that seem to be siphoning off ad dollars from the newspaper.”

Question for you: is it forbidden in your house to read anything but online? (i.e., are print newspapers brought in surreptitiously, for fear of the buggy whip?) Rhetorical questions only…. Cheers, Judy

The Star announced yesterday that both its publisher and editor-in-chief are leaving the paper. The online division is only a small portion of the Star’s operation. And I’m sure that it did not play a large role in the decision. Nevertheless, I think the reorganization announced by the Star clearly signals that the Board too believes that management wasn’t heading in the right direction. Which was my original point about the afternoon PDF edition.

By the way, I know Giles Gherson, the former editor – and he’s a good guy. I’m in no way celebrating his ouster.

I still remember Tom Williams of GiveMeaning.com at the mesh conference’s panel conversation: Can Web 2.0 Change the World?, indicating that supplying free computers to children in Africa was irresponsible, if the basic infrastructures and necessities of life (e.g., roads for transportation, clean and free water, electricity) were not taken care of first.

And, as I’ve realized in my job (dealing with a large membership and various publics)—some people just outright prefer downloading and reading a PDF file. Their choice.

How is this process not redundant?

People can print the web pages off just as easily as a PDF, can’t they? Why not just add a printer friendly icon on every page of their site and have the application strip out unnecessary graphics? This way people can print off any section of the paper without having to create an afternoon edition.

Perhaps the Star should investigate the Ajax programming methodology and the nearly limitless choices this provides end users in controlling / managing content on websites.

This reminds me of the story about how during the space race, the Americans spent millions on a pen that could write upside down in space. The Russians used a pencil. In other words, don’t try and create a solution when you already have a tool that will do the job (RSS), as Keelan has pointed out.

Cheers,
Jeff

The Star (like the Globe, but unlike the Post, Citizen, Gazette, etc.) offers RSS feeds. Which means people with a BlackBerry could have news sent directly to them throughout the day using services like http://www.inclue.com.

However, not everyone has a BlackBerry and its not always efficient to read longer messages/articles on BlackBerry because only so many bites of info get displayed at a time. Nor is it necessarily that efficient to surf the web on a Blackberry.

So, while I (and Joe) aren’t part of it, there may be a market for this amongst The Star’s readers.