Slowly, slowly, the dwindling band of journalists who survive all the cuts are being acclimatized to the notion that their job is no longer to serve the people in our democracy -- a tradition proudly built up over the past couple of hundred years, often at great cost -- but to serve their employer. So why don't we, the people, take over -- subsidize our precious democratic journalism ourselves? Here's the plan.

Seems that when you spend an hour watching Canadian TV news stories about politics, you get only about 15 minutes of real information. These scary numbers come from the highly respected charitable Samara Institute today. Samara has spent months doing all the research, the number crunching, and the drawing of conclusions. Will the newsrooms listen? Probably not.

When the Mirror was launched in the mid-1980s, it touted its independence and social purpose. I remember going to benefit concerts and parties organized to help it get off the ground and survive. But it's been shut down, and I fear even an online version wouldn't be able to pay even the most abysmal of salaries, or even reassert itself as a go-to source for young Montreal anglos.

A former CBC colleague-turned-journalism professor very politely questions the ethics of my writing this column for HuffPost. Surely, he suggests delicately, the internet in general -- and aggregators like HuffPost in particular -- are killing traditional mainstream, general-interest journalism. And, in the process, seriously damaging democracy. My reply...?

Over the past 40 years it has become something of an institution in Toronto -- beloved by some, despised by others, but always competitive, periodically incestuous, often irritatingly cheerful, occasionally naughty, and ever determined to be itself and to hell with what critics think.

(The Canadian Press) TORONTO - Postmedia Network Canada has announced that Christie Blatchford has left the Globe and Mail to become a national column...

Like every newspaper group, PostMedia is trying to figure out how to transition from a paid print circulation to a digital readership used to getting news for free. But changing human behavior is a tall order.

(CBC) --The Montreal Gazette, the city's largest English-language newspaper, is introducing a pay-for the-web model on its online site as of Wednesday...