From the Globe and Mail:

Before the New York Sun delivered its first newspaper in the spring of 2002, the naysayers were already circling, ready to proffer an epitaph.

The city was already congested with numerous daily papers, they warned. The timing was awful, given a looming recession.

Worst of all, they charged, the fledgling broadsheet was puny – despite the support of Conrad Black, who envisaged the Sun as the New York publishing foothold he always craved, the paper planned to launch with just $15-million (U.S.) in backing.

The predictions of the Sun's demise may have been a few years premature, but that doesn't mean they were wrong.

On Thursday, the conservative-minded newspaper acknowledged it was finally in danger of succumbing to these long odds – and to the increasingly harsh logic of the newspaper industry, which has been buffeted both by new media competitors, readership declines and a brutal slide in classified advertising.

The Globe and Mail's John Ibbitson draws the following links between the Obama/Wright controversy and coverage of Sarah Palin's various personal and professional pecadilloes:

The media frenzy surrounding Ms. Palin has been extreme, though no more than that which accompanied the imbroglio over Mr. Obama's association with his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright.

It is the product of a disturbing shift in how the media cover presidential elections. The proliferation of bloggers, Web-based journals and online videos drives the agenda. They broke the Wright affair, the controversy over Mr. Obama's "bitter voters" remarks, and churned the rumours over the pregnancy of Ms. Palin's unwed teenage daughter.

These revelations, invariably accompanied by accusations, commentary and false rumours, are picked up by the cable news networks, and then repeated in newspapers "now that it's out there."

The overall calibre of commentary declines, for which all of us in this craft are responsible.

Watching Soul Power -- which documents a remarkable event, the music festival held before the 1974 "Rumble in the Jungle" heavyweight boxing championship match in Zaire -- is like standing under the screen and taking an energy and joy shower.

Sad news broke out of Afghanistan today: Three more Canadian soldiers died.

What makes this different is that the deaths didn't occur as a result of a roadside bombing. Instead, the Taliban attacked the soldiers' LAV-III armoured personnel carrier directly.