For an organization that employs an awful lot of smart people, This American Life, the popular hour-long show produced by Chicago Public Radio, is doing something awfully stupid. Despite broadcasting to an international audience, the show’s online store refuses to sell any of their products to anyone who doesn’t live in the United States.

This might seem like a minor quibble, a petty stylistic complaint that ignores the show’s substance. Perhaps. But the world of public broadcasting, a climate where the Damoclean sword of budget cutbacks looms precariously and persistently over everyone’s heads, foregoing a potential source of revenue is a self-destructive form of stupidity.

For example, This American Life recently released a beautifully designed USB stick with 35 hours of content, at the eminently reasonable price of $30 US. I wanted to buy two or three of them for friends and family for Christmas, but was stonewalled by their online store’s refusal to ship outside the borders of the United States. I wasn’t alone, either, as the facebook thread announcing the product was filled with international listeners expressing varying degrees of frustration that they couldn’t order the product either.

For a show that frequently solicits donations from listeners, this is inexcusable. There are no legal prohibitions against shipping this sort of content across international borders, and the shipping costs themselves, given the size of the product, would be inconsequential. Meanwhile, given the fact that they’re already produced the content, the profit margin on each unit is probably somewhere in excess of 50 per cent of the total cost. By choosing not to ship to international customers, they’re ignoring an easy and plentiful source of money. A telephone call to their online store is greeted by a taped message noting that the store is run by a small staff, but that’s no excuse, given the insignificant costs associated with setting up a supply and distribution chain. It’s 2010, after all, and a nine-year old Uzbek kid could set up an online store, be it on eBay or Amazon or by using a payment system like PayPal. This is easy, easy stuff.

The producers of This American Life aren’t alone in manifesting this particular kind of self-destructive stupidity, either. The CBC has a long history of shooting itself in the foot when it comes to merchandizing and branding. That habit was demonstrated most recently in its ludicrous decision to hold a giveaway contest featuring some highly coveted CBC toques but choosing not to actually sell the things to people who weren’t armed with CFL trivia tidbits and couldn’t be bothered to wait by the phone for the cue to call in with them. There’s also the case of the CBC faux-Cowichan sweater worn by Radio 3’s Grant Lawrence. Given the intense interest in them that was expressed by online fans, the CBC could have easily contracted the real Cowichan knitters to make a few of them for their merchandise stores in Vancouver, Toronto, and Ottawa. But, of course, they did nothing of the sort.

Authenticity is a precious commodity these days, and there are few things more authentic than a public broadcaster and the content they provide. But given their unwillingness to monetize that commodity, the CBC, This American Life, and other public broadcasting entities are blind to its potential or opposed to its implications. I suspect the reason why most public broadcasters are so apparently reluctant to make money off their brand lies somewhere in between. On the one hand, they may think that any deliberate attempt to generate significant revenues from branded merchandise is a vulgar exercise in self-promotion, and one that might ultimately cheapen their brand in the long-term. On the other, they might not even know how to do so in the first place.

Regardless of the reasons behind their reluctance to properly promote their brand, it remains an inexcusably stupid habit. Public broadcasters aren’t flush with cash these days, and yet they’re missing out, on purpose or through sheer incompetence, on an easily captured and cultivated revenue stream that could help compensate for the inconsistent nature of government funding. They might even be able to use it to support new programs featuring new personalities, to grow instead of merely sustaining themselves. They certainly aren’t in any position to ignore such a tasty piece of low hanging fruit, and there’s no sense in doing so. That is, unless they’re deliberately trying to walk with a limp.

A link to my latest piece over at the Commons blog, which discusses the challenges associated with the Baby Boomers and their mushrooming health care costs. Here’s a hint: those challenges are about to get a whole lot more difficult to deal with.

Less than a month ago, Naheed Nenshi rode what his campaign team dubbed the “Purple Revolution” to an unexpected victory in the Calgary mayoral election. By choosing to talk with rather than at Calgary’s electorate, Nenshi managed to defeat establishment candidates Barb Higgins and Rick McIver. Last weekend at the Alberta Party’s policy conference in Red Deer, many of those same organizers began to lay the foundations for a political movement that would take the Purple Revolution province-wide.

It won’t be easy, mind you. Starting a new political party in Tory-dominated Alberta might seem like the very definition of a quixotic pursuit. After all, the Lougheed-cum-Getty-cum-Klein-cum-Stelmach regime has been governing the province since 1971, long enough to watch plaid go in, out, and back into fashion and witness both the rise and fall of the compact disc. The idea that an upstart political party, much less a centrist one, could knock them off their perch makes the Mayan doomsday forecast for 2012 seem downright credible.

But David King, the policy convention’s co-chair and a former Tory cabinet minister, can attest to the fact that anything’s possible in the strange world of Alberta politics. After all, it was the Tories themselves, led by a young lawyer named Peter Lougheed, that ended the reign of another well-entrenched party a generation or so ago. In 1965, Lougheed was elected the leader of a small upstart party known as the Alberta Progressive Conservative Party. Two years later, Lougheed and five of his colleagues formed the official opposition to Ernest Manning’s mighty Social Credit government. And in 1971, just six years after he was elected leader, Lougheed led his party to an improbable victory over the Social Credit Party, winning 49 of a possible 70 seats and ending 35 years of Social Credit rule.

Like Lougheed’s Tories, the Alberta Party is choosing to define itself by a willingness to listen to Albertans. That spirit of open and transparent consultation was on full display last weekend, as the party crafted its formative policy document after spending months on the road doing what it called “the big listen,” a series of smaller consultations that sought to determine what Albertans wanted from their government. This is the highest expression of grassroots populism, a genuine attempt to engage with citizens and form policies that reflect their concerns. It’s also a stark contrast to the kind of know-nothing populism that has become all too common in politics today, particularly south of the border, a political philosophy that abhors knowledge and expertise and extols banality and ignorance.

In his keynote address on Saturday, writer and consultant Satya Das told the audience that they weren’t engaged in the Battle of Alberta but instead the battle for it. The province, he told delegates, could be a place where people see resource wealth as something to be leveraged to better ends rather than exploited in the service of lesser ones. It is facing a choice, he suggested; either the resource wealth works for Albertans, or Albertans work for the resource wealth.

From a distance, that might not seem like a message that would resonate with Albertans. After all, they have continued to support a government that has been largely unwilling to address the social, economic and environmental consequences of its industry-first approach to the province’s oil and gas wealth. But conflating political outcomes with popular attitudes is a dangerous intellectual habit, and one that more often than not leads to inaccurate conclusions. That’s particularly true in Alberta, where the opposition parties have been so consistently weak and effete that the Tories could have run a ham sandwich as their leader in the last election and still come out on top.

Das wasn’t the only heavyweight in the room on Saturday, either. The party may only have 500-odd members so far, but already its ranks feature a remarkably diversity and depth of talent, from political players like blogger Dave Cournoyer and Chima Nkemdirim, Nenshi’s chief of staff, to private sector powerhouses like party president Chris LaBossiere and lawyer Brian Thiessen. Talent alone won’t get the Alberta Party into office, but it will get them aimed in that direction.

In his closing remarks, Chima Nkemdirim told delegates that the party is focused on winning the next election. That’s probably not a realistic expectation, given that the party only has 500-odd members and an undersized bankroll. Instead, the Alberta Party seems intent on playing a longer game, first building up a slate of constituency associations and a base of members with an eye towards not the next election but the one that will follow it somewhere around 2016. They’ll have to avoid a few pitfalls in order to get there, though.

First and foremost, the party needs a leader, and a viable one at that. They need to find their Peter Lougheed, somebody with the skills and the personality to engage and excite Albertans in the same way that Naheed Nenshi connected with Calgarians. In this respect, their timing couldn’t be much worse. Nenshi’s unexpected success removes him from consideration, while Edmonton’s Don Iveson, another candidate cut from the same bolt of cloth as Nenshi, was just re-elected to his second term as a city councilor. Doug Griffiths, the Progressive Conservative MLA for Wainwright and the Parliamentary Assistant for the Department of Finance and Enterprise, would be an inspired – and inspiring – choice, one who seems to reflect the Alberta Party’s commitment to genuine consultation and a new way of doing politics. They need, in other words, to think big.

That’s a habit that they’re going to have to learn to develop, too, if last weekend was any indication. It was clear to anyone who attended the various policy sessions that the party’s chief concern wasn’t developing policies that impressed and excited people but instead finding ones that wouldn’t upset or anger anyone. For example, a proposed amendment that would have had the party take a bold position on a feed-in tariff was watered down to a commitment to study the issue. Meanwhile, they drenched the policies that they did pass in the tepid waters of meaningless and hollow rhetoric.

This is the curse of centrist parties around the world, the tendency to seek policies and people that placate rather than inspire, and it’s one the Alberta Party desperately needs to avoid. People won’t elect parties that promise to consult, engage or study, much less one that’s never been in government before. Instead, they elect parties that promise to do and be, and those verbs were conspicuously absent from most of the policies that emerged from last weekend’s work.

Still, these are weaknesses that are easily addressed and overcome. In the end, what matters most is the fact that the Alberta Party has clearly signaled its willingness to listen to Albertans and act on those concerns. It’s a party with purpose, people, and passion, three ingredients that are essential to any successful political movement. More importantly, perhaps, it’s a party that provides hope that the province can one day be a place where people are willing and able to define their relationship to its enormous resource wealth, rather than having it defined for them. It provides hope that it can one day be a place where good enough isn’t good enough when it comes to environmental management and practices. It provides hope that it can provide national and global leadership when it comes to the development of energy resources and the transition away from a carbon-dependent economy. Most of all, it provides hope for Albertans who don’t believe in the choices the current government is making. Some forty years ago, Albertans got tired of politics as usual and decided to go in a different direction. They might just be ready to do it again.

My latest, over at The Commons, on the notion that the Government of Canada’s decision to reject BHP Billiton’s offer for the Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan means that Canada isn’t “open for business.”

On the surface, the recent Racism-Free Edmonton campaign – supported by the City of Edmonton and 13 local organizations, including the Edmonton Police Service, the Alberta Human Rights Commission and Edmonton Catholic Schools – has been a total disaster. The campaign, which includes a suggestion that white people ought to “acknowledge their white privilege,” has been the subject of highly critical editorials and angry letters to the editor accusing it of everything from “reverse racism” to perpetuating discrimination against white people. As a result, its core message seems to have gotten lost in the cross-fire.

Or has it? After all, maybe it’s the message inside the message that should be the standard by which the campaign is judged. After all, if anyone had become complacent about the stubborn persistence of racist beliefs – and, surely, that’s a description that fits more than a few of us – then the backlash against the Racism-Free Edmonton campaign shows just how much work is left to be done. I’m not suggesting that the campaigns architects deliberately crafted a clumsily one-sided message in order to smoke out the true scale and scope of this city’s most commonly traded racist beliefs and myths, but that’s effectively what they’ve managed to achieve.

The comment thread attached to an Edmonton Sun article on the campaign shows just how much work is left to be done in creating a society free from prejudice. There’s obviously a certain amount of selection bias at play here, and there’s the fact that the readership of the Edmonton Sun – or any newspaper in the Sun chain, for that matter – isn’t an accurate reflection of the population at large or its attitude towards complex social and cultural questions. Still, the comments – all 380 of them, so far – are revealing. Somebody named “Blazing Saddles” writes that:

this article is racist towards white people. Given the recent riot in LA–yet ANOTHER ONE, and the high crime rates in non-white neighborhoods, is it any surprise that landlords prefer whites? There’s a thing called “white flight” because whites don’t want to live surrounded by danger that they don’t cause. You would think non-whites would get a clue that their own BEHAVIORS have something to do with any different treatment if they see it at all. Usually, different treatment is in their favor, not against them. Stop blaming white people for your behaviors. take responsibility and end crime. Your whole lives will be so much better, and you won’t have to “go to white people to get it.

I see. Then, there’s the creatively named “Sickofracismonwhites”:

Call me what you want, but I am sick of the way white people are treated in the city of edmonton. I lived in your city for 13 years all of my schooling from Grade 6 on was completed in Edmonton and the minute my son was born I moved. I didn’t want my kids growing up with the racism like I did. My first year I didn’t notice it as much but JR High it was horrible. High School it got worse. Black Power Brown Power Asian Power. Then what is White power classified as KKK! I will tell you this I have friends and family of all cultures! I am sick of being segregated by the color of my skin. I am white did I choose this no I was born this way as was everyone else so give me a break!

 

Now, picking on idiotic and borderline illiterate comments from an online thread is poor sport at the best of times, and about as difficult as hunting for rabbits on the University of Victoria’s campus. All the same, it reveals the fact that the Racism-Free Edmonton campaign has struck a nerve. It’s a stupid and over-sensitive one, but it’s been inflamed all the same.

None of this is to suggest that Edmonton is a hot-bed of racism, or that the campaign’s decision to target white people is anything other than an abject failure to craft a compelling communications strategy. But it is precisely that failure that has succeeded in showing Edmontonians that there’s still work to be done in eliminating the stubborn myths that surround diversity-oriented hiring programs, workplace equality measures and other forms of affirmative cultural engagement. And, in the end, if white people – like me – can’t at least acknowledge that they’ve had an easy ride over the last, oh, two millennia, then they’re just being assholes.

My latest, over at The Commons, discusses Stephen Harper’s apparent devolution from a man with a formidable intellect to a cardboard cutout ideologue who shows no interest in educated or informed opinions. This transformation was made most clear by his government’s stubborn commitment to a monumentally stupid decision to cancel the long-form portion of the census, but that was just one in a series of silly choices the government has made over the past year or so. My theory, though, is that this isn’t happenstance or unintended consequence but instead a deliberate effort to dumb down government by a man whose tactical skills are well known and widely respected. Is Stephen Harper getting dumber, or just more cunning?

Today, after enduring a long and often acrimonious campaign, Torontonians will finally get the chance to choose their next mayor. The Joe Pantalone campaign might be holding out hope for a Naheed Nenshi-like miracle at the polls, but it’s far more likely that the winner of the election will either be Rexdale’s Rob Ford or Rosedale’s George Smitherman. But whether he wins or not, though, it’s been clear for months now that the election is all about Ford.

In the race’s early days, Ford was seen primarily as comic relief, a guy with a criminal record and a habit of getting obnoxiously drunk in public places whose only real claim to political fame was a longstanding refusal to spend the office budget given to every city councilor. He might give a good quote, it was thought, but Torontonians wouldn’t take him seriously as a candidate for the city’s top job.

But in the span of a few months, Ford went from a pasty afterthought to a serious contender in the race. While the race was expected to be dominated by George Smitherman, Ford quickly emerged as a serious threat to the former Ontario cabinet minister’s long-held ambitions. On May 14^th, a rumour circulated within the city hall press corps that a poll putting Ford in the lead was about to be released, and while that particular poll didn’t materialize another one with him in the lead did a few weeks later.

By June it was clear that his message that city hall was rife with corrupt spending and waste and that he was the only candidate qualified to bring it to heel was resonating with Toronto’s recession-battered and politically weary voters. And while some expected his sudden popularity to evaporate under the heat of public scrutiny, it actually managed to grow. By September 19, a Nanos Research poll put Ford’s level of support among decided voters at 45.8%, with Smitherman, the one-time shoo-in, all the way back at 21.3%. Smitherman managed to close that distance in the month that followed, but it’s clear that he did so less on the merits of his own campaign as on the fact that he was the only viable contender that could defeat Ford.

He was, in other words, the beneficiary of strategic voting, or, at least, strategic voting intentions. But strategic voting is never a victimless crime, and in this case the casualty was Joe Pantalone’s campaign. Pantalone, Mayor David Miller’s pint-sized deputy and a longstanding participant in civic politics, deserved better. He’s a well-respected man with a history of public service and a record of getting things done in a place, city hall, which almost instinctively resists such efforts. He would have made an excellent mayor.

The prospect of Rob Ford becoming the mayor of Toronto was too great for many of his supporters to bear, who held their nose and voted for Smitherman. Many of them found their decision an objectionable one, while other Pantalone supporters resented the pressure that was put on them to vote for someone other than their preferred choice. It will leave a bad taste in the mouths of many people, and sour them on an already unpopular political process.

The worst part is that it doesn’t have to be this way. In 2010, for some reason, we’re still saddled with an electoral system from the 19^th century, one that prevents us from expressing our political preferences in their fullest measure. Imagine, for a moment, what this election might look like if it were being conducted using a preferential ballot system, one in which voters rank the candidates rather than simply picking their favourite one. Pantalone’s supporters could happily vote for their guy, and still express their preference for Smitherman rather than Ford – or vice-versa, as the case might be.

That a preferential ballot system would eliminate the ugly practice of strategic voting is reason enough to implement it tomorrow. But there’s also the possibility that it would improve the polarizing political discourse of election campaigns, and allow us to have the “politics in full sentences” that helped propel Calgary’s Naheed Nenshi to the mayor’s chair. A candidate like Rob Ford would face almost insurmountable odds in a multi-candidate system, because if he didn’t win more than 50 per cent of the vote on the first ballot he’d steadily see his share of the vote decline as the second and third (and fourth or fifth, if necessary) preferences were tabulated. In a preferential ballot system, the politics of division and confrontation simply don’t work.

The gulf between the first-past-the-post system that we have and the preferential ballot system that we could is like the differences between what it was like to buy a bottle of wine in Ontario in 1965 and what it’s like today. In 1965, you had two choices: red, or white. There was no information about the kind of grape from which your choice was made, and no mention of its provenance. Today, of course, you can choose from a whole universe of wines, all with different grapes, styles, and countries of origin, and nobody in their right mind would choose to go back to how things used to be. I suspect if a preferential ballot system were introduced in Toronto, people would feel the same way about how voters elected the city’s newest mayor today.

Magazine launch parties are supposed to be exercises in unbridled and occasionally inebriated enthusiasm, but while that feeling was in the air last Thursday at the official unveiling of Eighteen Bridges it was joined by something decidedly darker.

The new Edmonton-based magazine, one that’s the product of a longstanding collaboration between writers Curtis Gillespie and Lynn Coady, was met with the same apprehensive optimism that would greet a premature newborn. While everyone in the second-floor ballroom at Edmonton’s Matrix Hotel desperately wants to see the new publication survive, they’re already preparing themselves for the possibility – the probability, even – that it won’t.

The creation a new print publication in 2010 is a cultural activity that lies somewhere between quixotic and crazy, the journalistic equivalent of a band deciding to record a disco album in 1982. Even the greyest of hairs in the business has figured out by now that print journalism’s days are numbered, with the number of those days still outstanding the only major point of contention. Eighteen Bridges is no mere print publication, either. Instead, it aspires to provide a home for long-form narrative journalism, a high-value cultural product that many major magazines and almost every newspaper left in this country have given up in the face of growing financial pressure. In a world where publishers are looking to trim any fat – read: non-essential editorial content – that they can find off their operation, the well-marbled cuts of long-form journalism have been a common target.

The good news, for those behind Eighteen Bridges as well as those hoping to see it survive, is that not all print is necessarily created equal. Books, magazines and newspapers might all share a front with a common enemy, but their ability to repel the incursions being made by the internet and online culture on their respective territories varies according to their defensive capabilities. Newspapers and other daily publications are by far the most vulnerable, and it seems unlikely that they’ll survive in their current form past the next decade, notwithstanding the Globe and Mail’s recent investment in new printing presses, a decision that may well prove to be the 21^st century’s answer to the Maginot Line, a fortification designed to fight a battle that’s already been lost.

Like the evening news broadcast, the daily newspaper is calibrated for a world in which people couldn’t get information instantaneously like they can and do today, not to mention one in which that access is provided free of charge. As such, the fundamental business case that made newspapers so profitable for so long no longer exists, and the only argument that remains to be made in their favour is a nostalgic one. While a printed summary of the previous day’s events might be a technological and cultural anachronism, its remaining advocates might say, the fact that it feels good, that it’s familiar, and that it reminds readers of the world in which they grew up is justification enough to keep it around. But decisions that are driven by nostalgia rarely turn out well, as anybody who’s been to a high-school reunion understands. Meanwhile, as the French learned in May of 1940, investing in the past is no way to defend oneself against the future.

When it comes to the dangers posed by online culture and the digital distribution of information, books are in better shape. While our growing universe of instant information has rendered the content in the average newspaper obsolete, the print that goes into the average book has a permanence that can’t be undermined by time or technology. A great book, after all, is timeless, while even a good one can remain relevant for years. For the book business, the influence of online culture is largely confined to how they’re distributed, and while that will certainly influence the shape of the publishing industry it’s unlikely to make much of a difference to writers themselves. For publishers, the challenge is about finding a way to create enough value in the printed product to bridge the gap between the price of a digital book and a bound one. But the durability of a book’s content, and the opportunities for inventiveness in the design and production processes, means that there will always be a community of people willing to pay extra for a printed version.

Magazines fall somewhere in between these two positions. A well-written and artfully designed magazine, after all, often feels like a smaller and more flexible version of a book, with content that can remain relevant and readable for months. More importantly, the information contained in their pages doesn’t degrade nearly as quickly as the stories in a newspaper do. So long as they make a meaningful commitment to quality and don’t try to compete with what’s available online, magazines should be able to survive their interaction with the internet and online culture.

That’s why I’m actually optimistic about the future of Eighteen Bridges. It’s unlikely that a new magazine committed to covering celebrity news, political intrigue or the scintillating world of mixed-martial arts would live very long outside the incubatory comforts of government grants and start-up funding. But by choosing to do something that almost every other competitor has given up on, long-form narrative journalism, Eighteen Bridges has a shot at survival.

This is rhetoric of the hollowest kind, a statement that deliberately tries to say something and nothing at the same time. And while the latter portion of it borders on the ridiculous – will he be giving people hugs after he decides to cut the funding for their kid’s school program? – it’s the first part that’s more important. At best, it’s wishful thinking, albeit of a strange kind. But at worst, it’s a deliberate misunderstanding – and misrepresentation – of the role and function of government.

The theory, one that’s been articulated with varying degrees of competence by conservative candidates from coast to coast in election after election after election, is that governments waste the money of taxpayers for no other reason than because they can. Without the incentive to create profits government bureaucracies remain terminally inefficient, unwilling to aggressively reduce costs in a way that would maximize the return on each dollar spent.

It’s certainly true that most governments would make appalling businesses. But applying the standards of business to the operation of government is a little bit like entering a cat in a dog show and expecting it to be judged fairly. A government isn’t a business, and citizens aren’t shareholders. Instead, citizens are part of a community that makes decisions and engages in planning of the kind that isn’t driven by the tyrannical bottom-lining that guides the private sector. There is no profit motive in the body politic, and attempts to graft one onto it are no more attractive than Jennifer Grey’s botched nose job.

Make no mistake, though. People like David Dorward aren’t confused about the roles of government and the private sector. Instead, they’re deliberately trying to marginalize the former and expand the latter. By equating the values of business with political virtue, they’re deliberately trying to confuse the two. What’s most worrying, and why David Dorward is more dangerous than he might appear, is the fact that this deliberate obfuscation has worked so many times before. In Ottawa, for example, Larry O’Brien was elected on a platform similar to Dorward’s, and Toronto continues to flirt with the idea of electing Rob Ford, a man whose proudest claim remains the fact that he doesn’t make use of the budget that’s allocated to every city councilor for office supplies.

We ought to treat people who campaign on a promise to run government like a business with the same disdain that we would reserve for those who would promise to operate their business like a government. It’s a form of willful stupidity, and one that masks an agenda that has less to do with making government more efficient than it does with marginalizing it and the role it plays in our lives.

The focus for most people will be on the aesthetics, on the paper stock and the minimalist layout, but for those of us more concerned with the bigger picture it’s more important to read between those newly reconfigured lines and see the redesign’s real message. At a moment where newspapers around the world are trying to figure out how to make the inevitable transition to a more flexible digital presentation, the Globe and Mail has decided to double-down on a dying mode of production. Print may not be dead, as Stackhouse says, but it’s terminally ill. As such, the Globe’s investment in print amounts to an expensive treatment campaign, one intended to extend and prolong its life, and while it might work in the short term it will do nothing to change the eventual outcome. It’s the rearguard battle to end all rearguard battles, and one that may doom the Globe’s chances of ever winning the larger war.

Stackhouse writes that “our part of the bargain was to create a newspaper that was equally daring – one that did not seek to prolong the past, but burns to invent the future,” but the paper’s new look and the philosophy behind it directly contradicts this statement. After all, one doesn’t “invent the future” by subsidizing the past, and for all the millions of dollars that have been poured into the Globe’s fancy new printing presses there’s been precious little invested in the newspaper’s next-generation infrastructure.

In fact, it was the decaying state of that infrastructure and the paper’s lack of interest in upgrading it that may have driven Mathew Ingram, the Globe’s longtime tech guru and communities editor, to quit his job for one at GigaOM, a leading American technology blog. As Jason McBride writes in “Yesterday’s News,” a Toronto Life piece on the Globe’s supposed metamorphosis, “Ingram is persuasive about the massive culture shift that’s currently underway and believes the only way newspapers will survive, let alone grow, is to fully embrace that shift—something the Globe hasn’t done.”

Instead, McBride writes, the Globe has apparently decided to tailor its business strategy around the whims of the Baby Boom generation, the last generation that still gives a fig about print. “Telling [publisher Philip] Crawley to get out of print would be like telling the Stones to stop touring,” he writes. “If boomers are still buying tickets, why quit? No matter how attractive the iPad may be—to readers, content producers and advertisers—the entire print readership is not going to migrate to any kind of digital platform overnight; the shift will be gradual, and for many, it won’t happen at all.”

Perhaps. But advertisers are by their very nature parasitical beings, and they’ll follow the host wherever it goes. That host, the news consumer, continues to move in the direction of online content, and while online activity still comprises a relatively small portion of the overall advertising revenues of most newspapers there are no guarantees that will be the case in perpetuity. In fact, it’s easy to imagine a day in the near future in which online advertising, a format that can be tailored to the individual user’s preferences and provide pick-up oriented feedback to advertisers, will be the preferred method of communicating with consumers. The traditional print advertisement, a format to which the Globe’s redesign clearly caters, may fall out of favour long before the paper’s contract with its new printer expires.

Short-term planning in the absence of long-term vision is rarely winning strategy for any business, but that’s what the Globe’s redesign is all about. Forget the future, it says; let’s just worry about tomorrow. In that short term, the redesign might appear to be a success, given that it caters so clearly to the interest and inclinations of the Baby Boomers. They are the ones who still fetishize the daily newspaper, the readers who will happily defer to the editor’s discretion when it comes to the stories they read and the way in which they’re presented. Given their demographic clout it may well prove to be a profitable move in the short term. Judging by his comments in McBride’s Toronto Life piece, Stackhouse doesn’t seem to care too much about the longer-term implications of his short-term strategy. “The daily quality newspaper will still be in demand for a number of years,” he says. “How many years? I don’t know. Certainly for as long as I need to worry about it.”

In the longer view, though, the Globe’s decision to renew its vows with the printing press may amount to professional suicide. My generation, after all, is the last one that will be willing to pay a premium for print. Even then, the number of people my age who still do is dangerously small and falling with every new technological advance. I consider my circle of friends to be a relatively informed and sophisticated one, and yet among them there are only a few that still have a subscription to the Globe and Mail. The number of them that have cancelled their subscriptions in recent years, meanwhile, is exponentially larger.

The situation is even direr when it comes to the next generation, those that grew up with Twitter and iPods and Facebook and any other number of technologies. People my age can still remember what it was like to live in a world in which access to information was more heavily mediated, and we’re still conditioned to privilege certain forms like the daily newspaper. The next generation does not suffer from this conceit, and the idea of paying for a printed accounting of the previous day’s news will be for them what the mix-tape is to us today, a quaint cultural artifact that belongs only in nostalgic recollections of the past.

It’s bad enough that the Globe’s redesign doesn’t speak to people my age. What’s worse is that it shows they’ve given up trying to altogether. Newspapers like the Globe and Mail, in their printed form, are living on borrowed time right now, and if they’re interested in surviving this decade, much less this century, they ought to be investing as heavily as they can in ideas and applications that can help them build a bridge between today’s readership and tomorrow’s. With this redesign and the millions of dollars that were poured into it, the Globe had an opportunity to begin that process. Instead, it decided to blow the wad on a decadent monument to the virtues of print.