[LINK] "t.o.night of the Living Dead"

[rfmcdonald]

Torontoist's David Topping has this discouraging review of T.O. Night.

The footer of the front page reminds readers that "We don't recycle old news, but please recycled [sic] old papers." t.o.night's attempt to avoid republishing news from the morning editions of its many competitors, especially Metro and 24 Hours, is admirable, but it also doesn't work: t.o.night only has a narrow window of time in which to snap up the stories its competitors don't get, and as a result simply doesn't have much news, or big news, or interesting news, to publish. t.o.night's Tuesday edition had one-third the number of pages as Tuesday's Metro.

And then there's that whole internet thing. John Cameron's introductory Publisher's Note boasts: "All of our content is fresh....We'll be the first with the big news of the day, so you'll be the first to be informed." As expected, the form and content belie that claim: the vast majority of the paper's news content comes from the Canadian Press, the Associated Press, or—on the paper's strongest page—BlogTO. The only stories that don't are on the Entertainment page, and are written by "t.o.night staff" or "t.o.night News Services," and all but one of those stories is simply a small summary of reporting done by other outlets: TMZ, Page Six, or empireonline.com. (The other story is about Melrose Place.) t.o.night can't ever be the first to any news story, because every news story in it is published elsewhere hours before, readily accessible to anyone with internet access.