Current news

I wasn’t there, of course, but my count there were seven newspapers hitting the streets of St. John’s yesterday. There were three dailies – The Globe and Mail, The National Post (I assume someone in town still reads it) and The Telegram. Then there were three weeklies – The Express, The Scope and The Muse. And finally, just for kicks, The Current came out for its one a month bow.

That’s a hell of a lot of papers. The coffee shops downtown must have looked like a tornado hit it.

I recall being with The Muse and trying to prevent a start-up paper from being distributed on campus. Ludicrous idea now, but back then it was serious business. The Muse was highly dependent on the advertising we got that was directed towards students. Now, you have several papers targeting the university market. It must be an ugly, ugly business being in the newspaper racket right now.

Don’t worry, this isn’t another complaint about The Express (although honest to God, the story about oddest place you’ve had sex made me want to whack my head off something. The story was so...boring. How can you make a subject like that dull?), but building up towards a story in The Current.

As Dana pointed out in the comments section in a previous post, there was a story about blogging in the paper. And a couple of local bloggers were mentioned and a picture of this blog was used to illustrate the story. I have no idea why; there are many other blogs that have better graphic design than mine.

When Dana mentioned it, I thought “Finally, someone is going to catch on and do a story about the local blogging community.” Because I think it’s kind of cool. Then again, I find online communities interesting. I think I was the first to do a story about Blue Kaffee. I also did a story about a Newfoundland sex group that operates on Yahoo. And I think the blogging community that has developed around the NL Blogroll is also interesting.

I’ve made new friends through blogging and the list. I was warmed when several of them came to my defence when I got slagged by a couple of people last month for some pretty weak reasons. And I would do the same if any of them had some trolls swing by. It’s nice. I like it. Plus it has the benefit of learning more about people, their politics and beliefs and I get to enjoy some pretty decent writing. Even Cathy, who didn’t quite understand what the big deal was about blogs has come around and now routinely checks out several each day.

And yet, The Current story really didn’t touch on any of that. Instead, it was a kind of half-assed look at blogging, pointing out a couple of international links and a few local ones. There was a fun little story there to be done, I think. Nothing earth-shattering, but certainly interesting enough. And they shanked it. It’s a pity.

This isn’t crapping on The Current as a whole. I think it’s a decent enough newspaper. And it’s certainly improved since it went back to a monthly format. You could clearly see the strain when it was trying to come out every two weeks. It’s just too bad they missed this story. There’s one thing worse than missing a story and that’s doing it, but not a good job of it.

Oh, and to any one whom is visiting the blog for the first time because of the picture in The Current – welcome. And yes, I’m this grouchy all the time. Others will vouch for this. But I make up for it by being clever and amusing.