Canwest cuts

My old employers, demonstrating their continued ineptitude and lack of understanding of the media business, have been forced to cut 560 jobs in Canada. This isn’t the first round of cutbacks, and it mirrors the 5 percent staff cut at Fairfax, the Australian media giant that is similarly out of touch with the times.

Cuts are inevitable, of course, but the lack of progress in adapting to new possibilities in journalism and new media suggests the smartest cuts would be at the executive level, where bungling, ineffectual strategies and general cluelessness are the norm. Have you looked at a Canwest website lately?

Interesting that this coincides with the debate between Rosenbaum and Jarvis over journalism’s fate. A zillion people have weighed in on this already, and it’s actually really boring, so my take, briefly, is that Jarvis is half-right: while the decline of journalism isn’t the fault of journalists, they must nonetheless take responsibility for where it is going. Canwest’s executives obviously aren’t up for that job.