Hunger Strike – Day One

It’s 6 a.m., and I would normally have tackled the machinations underway regarding Frank Stronach’s offer to swap his Class A super voting Magna shares for a $1 billion of cash, common shares and other benefits. You want Mr. Stronack’s votes?, pay up, I might have argued. They have an economic value. But, that post won’t be written today.

Today is the first day of our blogging “hunger strike”, and I’ve got the liquids ready. If the DTM isn’t going to provide appropriate acknowledgement for source material, then what choice do I have, dear readers (see prior post “Canadian Business Magazine KOs the Globe & Mail” June 15-10)?

I know that I’m risking losing the momentum of our 6 million hits a year, and that Globe and Mail readers were kind enough to vote our blog #4 in the 2009 “Best of the Money Blogs” survey (up from #9 in 2008), but enough is enough! Without the late George Bain to police them, we’re left to our own devices.

As journo Danny Sullivan has written, the mainstream media need to stop pretending that some of their stories just “leapt out” of their frontal lobes (see prior post “Why does the mainstream media ignore their own rules?” June 13-10). After 10 incidences of unattributed “copycat” writing at the DTM in less than 4 years, peaking with the KO piece from yesterday, a hunger strike makes sense.

MRM
(disclosure – part of my education was paid for with the financial proceeds of award-winning business journalism)