…nobody would pay for it if it was on sale.
Your articles are all bleeding-heart extreme leftist diatribes on how bad corporations are, and how great the North end is. This isn’t journalism, its biased opinion-piece tripe.
For instance, your Adam-suicide-bridge article presents the story in one way: the bridge needs a fence, and the HRM is so heartless for not putting a fence up. What it fails to mention is that the old, rickety bridge cannot bear the additional weight that a suicide-prevention fence would add. Of course, this is mentioned nowhere in the article.
And then there was that piece on the squeegee kids. God-awful sanctimonious one-sided tripe. Leslie Lowe should be fired: she’s a poor journalist.
But I can see why your rag is like this, if I put my marketing hat on:
The Coast acts as a way to market bars, concerts etc. to the bohemian poor-artist, or poor-student demographic. They do not have enough money to actually buy a newspaper, and they usually also do not have TV, so the only means for advertising to them is through the Coast.
Seeing as how the majority of this demographic shares extreme leftist, anti-capitalist, pro-socialist views, the Coast prints articles that pander to these views, as to keep their demographic reading. If the demographic keeps reading, the advertisers keep paying the salaries of the Coast’s operators.
I mean, look at the picture the Coast uses to display free advertising space to potential buyers: its an androgynous person in tight jeans, converse sneakers, and a hoodie, with a really bad haircut and dumb smirk, standing in what looks to be a very low-class neighborhood: exactly the demographic that reads the Coast, and that advertisers pander to..
So, would the sanctimonious Coast get off its high-horse, realize that even your hippy paper is not immune to capitalism, and start printing more neutral articles?
This article appears in Feb 21-27, 2008.
Agreed. I don’t mind the leftist-socialist-hippy bias as much as I hate that the journalism is weak. You can have a left or right biased story that still presents well balanced and logical arguements. The shoddy reporting makes me not even bother reading the articles anymore. I mostly use the paper copy for showtimes and concert listings and to line my cat’s litterbox.
For the record: the article on bridge suicides included the Bridge Commission’s claim that weight limits won’t support a suicide barrier. Further, we filed a Freedom of Information request asking for an engineering study to back up that claim. We got only an incomplete letter restating the claim. We have appealed the denial.
The partial letter claimed that weight tolerances were figured based on a snowy day with bumper-to-bumper traffic in all three lanes and with the walkways full of people. The letter was cut off, but it gave some figures of pounds per linear feet. Without an actual engineering study to back up the claims, I can’t really trust them. But, it could turn out that the addition of the barriers over the DND property actually exceeded the weight limits. It’s doubtful that the bridge would simply collapse as soon as it gets one pound over whatever limit is put forward, but rather the effect would be long-term. I’d really like to see a definitive engineering study.
I thought that was one of the exact issues discussed in the article?