Monday 5 October 2009

Houston snobs

An American blogger notes a Houston TV station's recent replay of the Houston Post's history fails to mention it was once owned by the Toronto Sun Publishing Corp.

Says The Brazasport News:

"Channel 55 in Houston aired a story about The Houston Post on Sept. 27 during its Sunday program called Postcards From Texas, which apparently is attempting to reprise the old, long-running KPRC-TV show that was called The Eyes of Texas.

"Each of the two embedded videos posted below run around 5 minutes, but if you don't want to invest 10 minutes of your time watching them, here's some of the things that caught my eye:"

Included in the observations:

"The Hobbys sold the newspaper in 1983, but for some screwball reason Postcards didn't mention that it was first sold to The Toronto Sun (that's in Canada) before William Dean Singleton and his MediaNews outfit took the reins to ride the old girl to the glue factory (officially termed an "asset sale" to the Houston Chronicle in the Postcards script.)

"EDITORIAL ASIDE: This de-Canadization of Post history is duplicated on Bill Hobby's Wikipedia page. Yes, I suspect skulduggery on the part of some wily public relations genius. But why? Because it looks bad that the Hobbys sold out to a Canadian company that published tabloid papers that include photos of scantily clad Sunshine Girls? What the . . . nevermind."

Even the text of the Postcards online replay avoids mention of the Sun purchase.

"The Hobbys sold the Post in 1983. Eventually, William Dean Singleton of the Media News group bought the paper and closed it down, selling assets to the Chronicle. The newspaper that had had Walter Cronkite as a college correspondent and Nolan Ryan as a strong armed paper boy ceased to exist in April 1995. Former employees, known to each other as the Post Toasties, were heartbroken."

We heard some folks in Houston had a problem with the Sun takeover, but 26 years later?

The anti-tabloid snobbery in Houston was apparently repeated in London, Ontario, when the Sun landed the London Free Press. The locals in Houston and London feared tabloidization of their longtime broadsheets.

Today, the Post is defunct and the Free Press is a shell of what it used to be.

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