A Slow News Millennium
Gee, how many stories am I going to have to watch/read about a new product before I get to watch/read about the next new product?
Because it seems like all this past week, the news - and I'm talking just about CBC and the Globe & Mail, here, real news outlets, the best we have in this country - has featured as the lead story and on the front page, a new product. And it's not even a new product that will cure cancer, reduce the new production of greenhouse gases, or find hidden weapons of mass destruction.
It's a new technology product for technophiles.
Now, I admit to being a bit of a technotard, so it could be that I'm just sounding off sour grapes here and that a new technology product on the market is 2007's equivalent of 1962's Cuban Missile Crisis, or 1979's Three Mile Island, or 2003's Invasion of Iraq.
Or it could be that journalism is dead in Canada.
And we were worried about irony there for a second.
I don't know if it's the not-so-rampant consumer in me or not, either, but I find myself wondering, "How much is Apple paying for all of this terrific coverage of its new product? Because it must be costing it a lot of money to get a picture of its new launch on the front page of the Globe & Mail. And since CBC is publicly funded, I guess I'm okay with it getting huge whacks of dough from Apple to feature the product first up in its news line-up."
That's what I find myself wondering. (I put my wonderings in quotation marks, by the way. Usually because I can't remember if I wondered out loud and then someone else heard and that someone will later call me up short on not using quotation marks.)
Yes indeed. At least Apple is paying through the nose for this... okay... who am I trying to kid. You know and I know and everybody else knows - Apple didn't have to pay a dime for all this news coverage. All it had to do was launch a new product, call a couple of people, and voila! The new all-in-on radio/phone/tv/computer is the biggest thing since the inventions of the radio, phone, tv and computer.
But is it bigger than the Government of Canada keeping secret a report which may or may not exist, of a floor crossing MP, who sounds suspiciously like a Spy (and looks like he's trying to sweep a lot of dirt under the rug, if you catch my drift), talking to Heads of State without us knowing anything about it while the Government was busily escalating the action in Afghanistan and calling anybody who didn't support this exciting and new foreign policy - anti-Israel? I mean, even if just the expense account of the floor crossing Kahn were to be made public, I'd feel like I'd had a bit of a news fix.
A new product? No. No, I'm afraid not. It's just not doing it for me. Call me a stickler for detail, but I don't think that's news. I don't even think that's much in the way of a new product, to be honest. Combining existing products into a smaller single product doesn't really make it a new product, to my mind.
And what does a story like this, leading in the news for a couple of nights and days, do to the market, anyway? I mean, if I was a shareholder in a company that produced one of the ridiculously clunky and incomplete products on the market currently, that will make users feel like they may as well be living in the old Soviet Union for all the cool factor they have now, well, I'd be tempted to cancel my subscription to the Globe & Mail. Maybe even start up CBC Non-News Watch.
Maybe even - sue.
Because, as a taxpayer, I have to say - unless you're getting gobs of money from Apple, CBC, money that is going directly into funding camel rides to advertise Little Mosque on the Prairie - that's not even paid advertising tarted up as news. I mean, you and I and everybody else knows it was never "real news" - let's not pretend we don't know what we're talking about here - but if it's not even paid advertising, well then...
...SOMEBODY is not getting their money's worth!
And that somebody is me!
And if I was a Canadian taxpayer in possession of one of those now-obsolete products NOT in on the same CBC at Six advertising campaign, I'd be even madder'n I am knowing that I'm paying for news but just getting advertising - that Apple is getting for free.
And I haven't even bought my first cell phone yet.
So here's the thing. And it's a free bit advice from a non-professional, a lay person, if you will, a watcher/reader of the news: If it doesn't seem even remotely like news? It isn't.
