We’d like to raise our coffee mug to rascally Vancouver Sun columnist Pete McMartin who took K&K to task Thursday for our aromatic review of his newspaper’s new signature coffee, which was unleashed on the masses to celebrate the Sun’s 100th birthday. We enjoy McMartin’s columns, but alas the feeling isn’t mutual. It seems he took offense to our “lazy characterization” of his paper’s “less dense” and “more mellow” editorial shift over the past decade. He even went so far as to call it “bullshit” before listing some of the great work his colleagues are doing—which we don’t dispute—and rubbing our noses in his newspaper’s 38 Jack Webster awards to the Courier’s none. Bam.
Initially we were going to launch a scathing rebuttal and blame our lack of Websters on corporate conspiracy, but we were too distracted by a story the Sun had just posted to its website: “Abbotsford gets Lingerie Football League team” and the completely necessary 17-picture photo gallery that really fleshed out the issue for us. Mind you, it wasn’t quite as investigative as the 40-image Lingerie Football League gallery posted last year—on the same day the paper, possibly ironically, launched its Raise a Reader campaign.
And if McMartin honestly believes the Sun’s growing dependence on stories from other newspapers and wire services, updates on Demi Moore’s rehab stint and the daily barrage of syndicated “health” stories (shedding light on important discoveries such as Android phone users are more likely to have sex on the first date or how “fat people fall more”) don’t constitute filler or indicate an editorial shift toward softer, more info-tainment style stories, then we’ll have whatever he’s drinking.
