Results tagged “newspapers”

And what are your kids doing tonight, besides hanging out in a dimly lit club?

George McCullagh seemed to have it all: a rags-to-riches back story; a brash, cocky charm that appealed to financiers, politicians, and the public; a growing family; influence in the back rooms of government; and ownership of several Toronto daily newspapers. He even attempted to lead a crusade to change the nature of government that would enable him to fulfill his belief that he alone could improve the state of affairs for Canadians or at least the state of affairs for his friends in the mining industry. Ultimately all of this may have been too much for one body to handle.

On the same night that their magazine counterparts were feeding on a chocolate fountain at the Carlu, the scrappy newspapermen and women of Toronto's major dailies were knocking back bottles of Molson and rocking out at the Opera House: Newzapalooza V, the city's fifth annual Battle of the Media Bands, went down last Friday, raising close to eight thousand dollars for the Children's Aid Foundation. And far from strumming as Rome burns, the event served—intentionally or not—as a defiant celebration of the romantically proletarian spirit that somehow still manages to underpin the culture of the broadsheets.

No statistics have ever been made public about the number of deaths and injuries caused by the swift, sudden attack of colossal bellboys bearing large stacks of classifieds that descended upon downtown Toronto during the spring of 1936. Urban legend has it that the attack was an extreme ploy launched by the Toronto Star in its circulation war with the number two paper in the city, the Telegram, that was intended to bury "the old lady of Melinda Street" in a mound of newsprint.

Every single one of the 107,000 copies of Now Magazine published each week is read by (on average) three different people. Sure, PMB, whatever you say. Perhaps that's not surprising when your annual studies—used to determine readership numbers and thus a year's worth of ad rates—are based largely on how recognizable a publication's logo is [PDF].

Attention drivers intending to head out of the city for a relaxing weekend drive: if a bill before the Ontario legislature is passed, you may have to keep your brand new Model T off country roads on Saturdays and Sundays. According to The Star, "the two days selected were picked on as Saturday is market day, when the country roads are very busy with farmers' conveyances, and Sunday was chosen as the 'day of rest.'" Fear not drivers, as the proposed law does not apply to urban areas and "the bill is so drastic that it is hardly probable it will pass the House."

Photo by jzakariya from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

Just like blogTO, Torontoist got a tip from one of our readers Thursday morning, alerting us to the imminent disappearance of Toronto Star newspaper boxes around town. And just like the recent spate of National Post newspaper box cutbacks, this had us worried. That newspapers are on their deathbed is a well-worn cliché, promulgated first with the rise of web-based news sites and whose spread accelerated with the economic meltdown that is stripping media outlets of their advertisers. We didn’t want to jump to conclusions, though: the Star is—at least relatively speaking—a strong performer. According to the Newspaper Audience Databank, in 2007 the Toronto Star outperformed all other newspapers in the city: it had 2.1 million weekly readers, compared to 1.2 million for the Toronto Sun, 1 million for The Globe and Mail, and 500,000 for the National Post.

Torontoist first learned of the mysterious case of the disappearing National Post this weekend, when we woke to find newspaper boxes empty throughout the downtown core. We had just started coming to grips with losing the Post’s Toronto magazine-style insert—a Saturday morning without the paper altogether seemed rather overwhelming. The forlorn boxes, like the one above at Bay and Bloor, bore only a sticker, notifying readers that those locations would no longer be serviced.

Since January 2006, quirky black-and-white brushstroke illustrations have graced the back page of the The New York Times Magazine. The work is that of Toronto-based designer and OCAD teacher Bob Hambly, who just completed his 500th illustration—a bus—for the prestigious Sunday newspaper supplement.

Tonight the Drake Hotel hosts the second edition of its Nonfiction series. The big idea is that a bunch of journos sit around at the bar swapping stories that never made it to print, like one imagines Charles Foster Kane's newspapermen might have done. Only for a $5.30 cover, civilians are allowed to come listen.