I had a very sad and very maddening experience while visiting Regina for a few days this past week. I bought a copy of the Leader Post which has been a daily newspaper in the Queen City for 134 years. I would bet money that the L-P won’t be around a year from now.
The product that PostMedia charges $1.75 for is a total disgrace. I picked it up on a Tuesday, the morning after the Regina Pats of the WHL had delighted their hometown fans by advancing to the third round of the playoffs for the first time in 24 years.
The front page, and at least half the sports section, should have belonged to the Pats. But the Leader Post didn’t even have the final score. They also didn’t have any results from the Stanley Cup games the night before.
There’s still a building called the Leader Post at Park and Victoria, but heaven knows what’s in there besides the angry ghosts of guys like Bob Hughes and Scotty Melville.
The L-P is printed by its sister paper, the Star Phoenix, in Saskatoon. It’s shipped south to Regina on trucks, and I’m betting that those trucks are rolling long before sundown. If you want to place an obit for a loved one in the Regina paper, be prepared to wait a couple of days while they edit and assemble that section in North Dakota.
Instead of calling it The Leader Post, the masthead should read Dead Paper, barely walking for a few more days.
The dwindling number of people who still work at the PostMedia dailies across the country probably don’t even bring their lunch to work any more. Yes, I know that the L-P did provide suitable coverage of the Pats’ big win, and we could no doubt find it before breakfast, along with lots of other stuff – online.
The big boss of all this is a Torontonian named Paul Godfrey who is paid about $1.7 million a year. He recently signed a two year contract extension.
You have to wonder why?
I’m Roger Currie
