Sunday, May 10, 2009

Return on investment

Last month, I was one of many to point out the Tyee's experiment in providing readers with coverage of the areas they wanted to see addressed within the B.C. provincial election campaign. Today, the Tyee follows up with the results - and it's remarkable how much a single independent newspaper was able to uncover in a short period of time. So kudos again to the Tyee and its donors for finding an innovative way to meet some obvious demand for greater attention to issues in the campaign.

But the Tyee's success in breaking multiple stories with an investment of $25,000 for a month raises some other serious questions. To wit, why is it that such significant stories - especially those about ballooning health records costs and a lack of required reporting from a B.C. Rail trust which figures to show a significant loss - managed to slip through the cracks until it was too late for them to be fully canvassed before the election? And if B.C.'s corporate press has been as negligent in documenting the provincial government's activities as appears to be the case, then how much more figures to be lurking just below the surface, presumably to be disclosed at just the right time to make sure that voters can't pass an informed judgment on the Campbell government?

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