Monday 30 April 2007

Video Clipped

Video Clips, a Sunday Sun TV guide feature since the early 1980s and written by Jim Thomson since 1994, has become a Canoe.ca-only column.

It's a big Thumbs Down for that decision. The video column online gets lost among the ads and site promotions. It doesn't have the presence it had in Sun Television.

Sun Television, at 36 pages, is anemic and a poor excuse for a TV guide in a major Toronto daily newspaper. It is a shadow of the tabloid's 70 to 80-page guide packaged weekly by Gord Stimmell before he was axed in 1999 after 25 years at the Sun.

Gord was quickly picked up by the Toronto Star and is now editor of StarWeek, Canada's largest newspaper television magazine. The Sun guide, once his pride and joy, has been fading fast since his abrupt departure.

So what is next for Sun Television? Will it be axed in favour of the Canoe.ca television guide and Sun readers be damned? Might as well. There has been little effort to beef up the thinning guide.

Update: A TSF reader says Canoe.ca does have online TV listings, but once again, they are not as convenient as a TV guide in hand.

And online listings are useless for people who do not have computers, including seniors and low income earners who count on a weekend newspaper for their TV listings.

This tunnel vision rush to online everything ignores thousands of faithful Sun readers who are not Internet savvy.

1 comment:

  1. There already is an online television guide. Click the TV listing link off http://jam.canoe.ca/Television/

    And considering that satellite TV and digital cable comes with onscreen programming guides, actual printed TV listings are an anachronism. I'm half amazed that any newspaper company still kills trees for the sake of printing a TV guide.

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