Wondering what tragic news event The Sun will exploit and sensationalize for its cover tomorrow? Based on last week, we have a likely candidate [link now expired], though the death of another "tot" in gang violence could also fill the paper's daily quota of grisly.
UPDATE (11:00 p.m.): CityNews is reporting that the boy who fell from the apartment building earlier today is, allegedly, a "would-be robber" who fell while trying to escape. Maybe some stories just sensationalize themselves...
UPDATE (12:35 a.m.): The Star confirms that the fall was a botched robbery, and releases more details about Ephraim Brown's exceptionally sad death. What the media does with the latter story next is anyone's guess, but let's hope—for everyone's sake—that this doesn't become the circus that the event it's being compared to, Jane Creba's death, was.
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BIG SCARY HEADLINES! EXPLOITATIVE SPIRALING VIOLENCE ARTICLE, MORE POLICE NEEDED
It's been said before, but who can take seriously a "newspaper" that has a swimsuit edition?
Man, it's a tough day to be a newspaper around here!
Kevin - Unfortunately a huge chunk of the Conservative-voting rural public does. Go to a factory break room in Belleville and you won't find the Globe or Star, you'll find the Sun and a lot of people nodding in agreement.
How is this a sad death? At 16 you know more than enough not to break & enter a person's home. Not to mention that robbing apartments on Victoria Park is pretty stupid, unless it belongs to a drug dealer to make it lucrative but ultra stupid if the homeowner finds out who did it.
This is Darwin award territory, not anything to be sad about. One less violent criminal plaguing Scarborough - breaking into a house is violent, especially given the number of people seriously injured/killed during home invasions.
Re: #4, note the updates made this evening -- at the time that the original article on Torontoist was written, the death of the boy who fell was declared an "accident" and there was no other information about his death. The Star's original article (the "likely candidate" one that I linked to) has since disappeared.
In the end, The Sun went with a photo of Brown with "INNOCENT BLOOD" on top of it.
Guess who else exploited (i.e., used it to draw readers) the tragedy? Ummm, the Globe, the Post and.... Torontoist in "Summer of the Gun Continued etc".
Not to be too defensive here, but today's news post, which I didn't write and wouldn't have written in that way, wouldn't have "drawn readers" in any traditional web sense -- it wouldn't have been picked up by Google News, didn't have keywords that would attract readers in. It was a very matter-of-fact recap of the weekend's major news stories.