The Globe and Mail's Simon Houpt looks at Clayton Patterson, who moved from Calgary to New York a generation ago and who chronicled the subcultures of his Lower East Side neighbourhood, incurring the enmity of the authorities in the process.

From Judith Timson's column in the Globe and Mail:

Have we had enough yet?

Enough of the macabre and heretofore unthinkable details of the stabbing, decapitation and defiling of Tim McLean, the 22-year-old carnival worker who lost his life on a Winnipeg-bound Greyhound bus last week when a man apparently went berserk and - well, I'm going to try not to repeat the details.

It now makes me nauseous to read them, let alone regurgitate them.

Yet since news of the murder first leaked out last week, I've mentioned "beheading," "stabbing" and even "eating the corpse" in conversation with friends and family, as if I were reading aloud from a Hannibal Lecter novel and not passing the time of day.

From the NYT:

WANT to buy a newspaper company? No? You’re in good company.

The Chicago Sun-Times is the kind of trophy that once appealed to deep-pocketed buyers. It has a big audience in a big market, a storied name, and stars like Roger Ebert and Robert Novak. The Sun-Times Media Group, owner of the flagship paper and dozens of smaller suburban papers, said in February that it wanted to sell assets or maybe the entire company. The chief executive, Cyrus F. Freidheim Jr., said May 8 that “a large number of parties” had asked to see the books, and that the company expected to field offers by the end of that month.

Since then, silence.

This is no isolated case. While all publicly traded newspaper companies have seen their share prices fall in the last year — drops of 50 to 70 percent are commonplace — some have tumbled so far that any number of bargain hunters could snap up a controlling interest, despite the credit squeeze. But they haven’t.

PS: On July 21, the New York Observer asked: Black and white, red all over -- Is 2008 the Worst Year in Modern Newspaper History? (seen at The Tyee)

U.S. citizen interest in politics is up in this election year, but some mainstream media outlets aren't finding their own audience metrics rising as a result.