Local media in 2016. Not good.

The St. Catharines Standard, under its masthead, proudly states "SERVING ST. CATHARINES AND NIAGARA SINCE 1891" on the left, and "POSTMEDIA" on the right. It has an imprint on page A2. It acts the part of being a daily newspaper in the traditional sense.

Traditional it is not. Traditional papers check facts before publishing them. Traditional papers proofread and eliminate spelling and grammatical errors before publishing them. Traditional papers prominently display when they are publishing a different version of a story than that they had previously deemed fit to print. Traditional papers run a list of corrections to their errors. These are things that made traditional papers a trustworthy source of news. And The Standard, under its current leadership, fails at all of them.

Masthead of a fallen newspaper

Today, March 19, 2016, The Standard is publishing an editorial about Earth Hour. They don't do many editorials, and after reading this one that is probably a good thing. It isn't controversial, and the position could pretty much be summed up as "Make as many hours Earth Hour as you can."

It contains the same problems with commas that are allowed to make their way into so many stories at that paper:

But again, that movement is slow and hopefully, not too little too late.

The real problem is revealed a few short paragraphs later. In an attempt to laud Brock University for increasing their waste diversion rate they actually write the opposite.

And Brock University says it has reduced its waste diversion rate to 68.5 per cent as of last year, keeping a lot of junk out of landfills.

They probably got the number wrong too: Brock's report of May 12, 2015 says they managed to increase their waste diversion rate to 65.8% in 2014. If The Standard has another source, which coincidentally has the same digits in a different order that would be something.

The culture of The Standard being what it is, the print version of this editorial will likely stand uncorrected. The existence of that same culture means that should they decide to correct the online version they will do so with no notice of correction.

The Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage is in the midst of a study on Media and Local Communities. Just before bringing her committee in camera at the end of the meeting on February 23, the chair, Hedy Fry, made the offhand comment

I have a question that I would love to ask you, but I think we're running out of time. I would like to ask you to please send the answer in writing. Now you are regulating broadcasting, radio-television, and telecommunications. Who is going to regulate, in terms of accuracy, the digital platforms? Anyone can put anything out there and nobody knows if it's accurate or if the quality is there. People read it and they buy it. The big question is how we regulate this. That's a huge question. Maybe you could send us an answer.

Anyone can put anything out there and nobody knows if it's accurate or if the quality is there, she despaired. Ms. Fry might as well have been specifically talking about The Standard. The quality certainly isn't there, and the accuracy has to be questioned as well.

The truth is that many online platforms provide more transparency about altered content than is the case at The Standard. Altered posts on Facebook get tagged as "edited" with a link to see previous versions. Once a tweet is crafted and sent on twitter there is no altering it; it either remains as is or is deleted. Any replacement tweet will show a newer timestamp. Even in Wikipedia the entire revision history back to the original lousy article is readily available.

Postmedia has allowed the newspapers they own to fall short of being worthy of the name newspaper. Altering published material with no notice in a newspaper is not good. It's not good like Napoleon having the barn wall changed in Animal Farm not good. All news sources are equal. Some are less equal than others.

The Standard's shabby editorial that I have written about here is not an isolated bout of awful. It probably wouldn't make a bottom 5 list of awful for the week, but it is what is current.

Postmedia has given the editor-in-chief title for three papers in this area to Peter Conradi. I have focussed on The Standard because it is still a daily newspaper, but the Niagara Falls Review and Welland Tribune are not at all good either. All three have some decent writers but the tolerance of garbage has created a culture where it often seems the stories that make their newspaper have not even been proofread once. If Postmedia doesn't care enough to fire the editorial staff responsible for that disaster of a paper then the parties responsible should have a small shred of dignity and quit.