Sunday newspaper inspires
I feel so inspired to create and achieve this morning. I also feel inspired to laugh and create jokes.
If you haven’t noticed, Alberta has a new slogan that will surely inspire us to create and achieve our way out of this economic black hole. May it also inspire the rest of the world to ignore what’s happening up in Fort McMurray.
I really must be inspired this morning because I woke up at 7:15 a.m. thinking about writing; some I wanted to do for fun, like this, and other writing I wanted to do for work.
I started the morning off with coffee and a quick skim through the Edmonton Sun that we get on Sundays. Yes, a dead tree publication. I don’t feel like carrying my laptop everywhere, thank you very much.
Sunday newspaper
Seems like an appropriate time to digress. We get the Edmonton Sun on Sundays. One day a week. The family seems to like it. I would like to get the Edmonton Journal, but why not just on Saturday? Think the Journal will do that? Nope. Monthly, or Friday, Saturday, Sunday only. That’s it. And, the weekly price is about $26 while the three day price is about $21.
I only want it on Saturday though. I guess I’ll have to get off my lazy ass and go for a walk to get it.
Having a look at the Edmonton Journal’s subscription prices, I also realize that there is no incentive to sign up for more than a month at a time. There’s no discount for signing up for 3, 6 or 12 months. As crazy as it seems, it’s slightly more money to sign up for 3 or 6 months!
Does that seem crazy to you? It’s not like $3 makes that big a difference in my life, but I take it where I can get it. Who’s asleep at the switch in the subscriber department at the Journal?
With newspapers having problems staying afloat, you’d think they’d do the math and actually give people incentives to sign up for as long as possible. If it’s possible to only sign up for the digital edition, it’s really not obvious on their site. Sigh.
For someone who’s a big defender of the newspaper business and mainstream media in general, I’m disappointed. Please, hurry up and get it. Adjust your business model to reflect the changing times. I want the mainstream media to survive so we won’t be subjected to thousands of bloggers who think that they’re journalists and who will subject us all to opinion masquerading as news. (I fear it’s already happening/ed.)
I’m extending my invitation to the Journal and other media organizations to give you a hand. I’ll help you out. Want an outsider perspective? Would you like someone who has experience as a journalist and the web? Even better, I’ve published my own newspaper. I get it. I’ve been on both sides of the fence.
$25 million down the drain?
How the heck did I go from wanting to talk about Alberta dumping $25 million down the drain on a new slogan and PR campaign to offering to be a consultant for the media? The mind works in mysterious ways!
So, about that $25 million. I had to laugh at Martin Hudson’s column in the Edmonton Sun. (Neil Waugh used to write that column on the comment page, but I heard he got the boot. Now it seems Waugh is writing the outdoors column for the Sun. Not a bad gig I guess. Hope the mortgage is paid off.) Hudson speculated that perhaps the slogan was spotted at the bottom of a bong. Ahh, that made me laugh. Perhaps if there had been a bong involved in the process, there would be better slogan.
Being a resident of Alberta for less than two years, I hadn’t realized that “Alberta advantage” had been the province’s slogan. I won’t get into that one here, but being able to compare and contrast Alberta to other provinces, I’m not sure about some of the advantages. That’s another blog post though.
The Alberta government has opened the floodgates for copycat slogans that will inevitably focus on the folly of Alberta’s ruling party.
Just a word of advice to the Alberta government: if you want to change how the world perceives Alberta, it’s going to take some real action on the environment and not just a new slogan and an ad campaign. If only it were that easy.
I’ve talked with a variety of Albertans about oil, politics and the environment. I’ve talked with conservatives, liberals and greens. They all care about the province, and despite what our government might think, they are all concerned about keeping the province as unpolluted as possible.
When it comes to industry and the environment, it is possible to be clean and non-polluting. It’s up to the Alberta government to make this happen. We can have our cake and eat it too. We owe it to future generations of Albertans to give them a province with a clean environment and sustainable economy. The question is: does this government have the vision and the will to do it?
It would seem that 21.6 per cent of eligible voters in Alberta think so. (52.66% of the 41% of voters who turned out to vote.)
