The Victoria TC Doesn't Deserve Your Business!

The Victoria Times Colonist does not deserve my business.  Or yours.  I've thought about this for a while.  I am a subscriber and get the paper delivered to my house every day.  Every day except Mondays of course as they don't publish a paper on Monday.  But that's a different issue I have for a different time.  I don't think much of the paper.  It is astonishingly thin most days and carries not nearly enough local content. The op ed is not bad, and the letters published are a good read, though I think more space should be devoted to them.  But it is the Homes sections, (yes sectionS) that cause me so much irritation.

Homes sections, like weekly real estate rags, rely on Realtors and builders for the ad revenue to pay for the paper.  I'll address the weeklys in a future rant.  It is safe to say that the advertisers are all local.  They, (I don't say we because I refuse to give the TC my business), promote local buildings and properties.  The point is to promote our city and surrounding area to potential buyers.  Space in the paper is not cheap.  In fact it is ridiculously expensive.  One of the perks of being the only game in town I guess.  I assume that the paper publishes these sections for readers who are interested in real estate.  Not just buying and selling, but maintenance, trends, decorating, landscaping and the like.  I assume the paper is aware of the fact that most of the people who will read these sections are from Victoria or are visiting Victoria.  SO WHERE'S THE LOCAL CONTENT???

Reading about mansions in Toronto or neighbourhoods in Montreal or building trends in Ottawa really pisses me off frustrates me.  We have a terrific local building scene that occasionally gets an article.  We have wild and wacky personalities in our business that would make great features but get no press.  We have wonderful architecture, diverse neighbourhoods, unique construction, local craftsmen, a strong visual arts community and, of course, gardens galore.  Now to be fair the gardens get a lot of attention.  But it's the same ones over and over again.  There's enough material here to make the sections a compelling, if not mandatory read.  But there is so much syndicated, nationally published, recycled, vanilla, overdone, retreaded crap in our local homes sections that frankly you could be reading any paper in any city in the country and if not for the local advertising you wouldn't be able to tell where you were.  

The local advertisers should be served by having local content drive the readers into the sections and have them stay awhile.  Maybe then they'd notice all the ads that my colleagues are running.  The way the Homes sections are put together fails to serve the reader or the advertiser.  Only the paper itself is served, and surely I am not the only one who sees this.  It's a great plan if you want to go out of business.  As it is the sections are worth about 5 minutes every other week, flip flip flip.  Why would I want to support that?  Why do you?  Print is dead, stop feeding it with your hard earned marketing dollars and put this old dog out of its misery.