Does the term “tabloid” not carry its own honour Given that the freebies are chained to the paid-circulation newspaper boxes on street corners across the land—saying, essentially, here I am, free and easy, so why bother with all that detail, nuance, and argument—shouldn’t the nadbank follow up its data analysis with the policy statement: the rumours are accurate, unless something is done newspapers, traditionally conceived, are done for. And if the good folks in charge of Torstar and Sun Media believe, somehow, that readers will graduate up to the paid-circulation dailies—the Toronto Star and the Toronto Sun—perhaps they should have attended superior business schools.

The clear subtext of these freebies is that in this just-in-time world they are providing all the news that is fit for print. And I see them daily, on buses and streetcars and in cafés, the perusers of the free dailies, alone and apart and lumpen, leafing through the pages in search of Sudoku, Jessica Simpson, or a hopeful advertisement, and the reader-newspaper conversation ends there. The freebies have used the shadow of legitimacy provided by their partnerships with more traditional brethren to nestle their way into the newspaper category, but what of Hébert and Travers, of Coyne, of the plain-speaking Danielle Smith and her conservative props, of Murphy’s thesaurus, or even of Robert Fulford’s stab at being the nation’s contrarian What of the Ping-Pong narratives between the editorial desks and the kitchen cabinets of the nation

Toronto’s new media moguls, Bill and Bob, and their simulacra elsewhere will fill the void, will be coming, if they haven’t arrived already, to a bus or theatre near you. Unless, of course, we do collectively what Vancouver did to Wal-Mart, the big-box-store version of the little-box tabloid now jamming up our street corners, and say “No, thank you ever so much, but the world cannot be compressed into a thirty-minute read, any more than our anxieties can be assuaged by robotic greeters, and we would rather pay for quality.”

With CanWest, owner of the National Post, giving us the Dose, among the broad-circulation newspapers only the Globe and Mail remains unencumbered by the free daily, by a loss leader in only one meaningful way: the end of those voices we need to sustain a real diet, of those voices committed to the public square. To writers over packagers: as your masters attempt to undercut you, hold out. Here, in the urban wilderness we are not yet prepackaged, and we require your shrewd commentary, snarky remarks, and the sustenance you provide for our discussions with neighbours.