Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Death

Print is dead? Don’t you believe it (and you read it here first, online). West-end light poles and garbage bins are festooned with Toronto Community News flyers seeking "boys, girls, seniors and adults" to deliver the Parkdale-Liberty Villager newspaper twice a week. Up for grabs are regular monthly pay, "financial freedom from your parents," and that old standby from more innocent times when almost every kid with a bike had a paper route: "Win great prizes."

Someone, somewhere, though, doesn’t seem to like what’s going on. Whoever put up the flyers was smart enough to stick mainly to side streets rather than Queen Street where the big-time club and concert bill-posters would quickly obliterate them. But some person (or persons) unknown has gone around and ripped off the contact information and little tear-off strips from many of them. It has been suggested that this could be the work of a person simply anxious to nail down a job but grabbing the whole thing from so many posters looks more like vandalism.

Could this be the opening salvo in a community re-enactment of the classic old Star versus Telegram newspaper wars? Could Homburg hats with a press card in the brim be the next hot fashion trend? Hold the front page! Whatever that means these days.

Photo by Bill Taylor/Torontoist