Kicking ass in Canadian journalism

I laughed along with Paul Wells last year, as he routinely mocked the paper’s outsized headlines, Greenspon’s hyberbolic weekend column (“Unprecedented insight!”), and the in-house “re-imagination” strategy. Who’s laughing now? According to today’s WSJ, the Globe and Mail is kicking ass in Canadian journalism, and doing better than most of its US counterparts:

In contrast with most U.S. newspapers, which are suffering from declining circulation and seeing their share of advertisers' dollars shrink, the Globe is selling more papers and winning advertisers away from the three other daily papers that serve Toronto, Canada's largest city and home to one-quarter of the nation's population.

For the six months ended Sept. 30, the Globe's circulation climbed 5% to an average of 335,013 on weekdays. During the same period, average U.S. daily newspaper circulation declined by 2.6%; and among the country's biggest 20 papers, as measured by circulation, only one, the Newark, N.J., Star-Ledger, gained circulation.

The WSJ goes on to assert that the Globe has pretty obviously won the newspaper war with the National Post (described as Conrad Black’s “pet project”), but Greenspon himself isn’t allowing himself to gloat too much. "Newspapers are falling off the cliff," he says. "But we're at the back."

(thanks to the handcaper for the link)