Funny Canadians. Our editors get into knockdown-dragout brawls where they kick the shit out of each other just for bad writing. The Northern version? Your union editing job: outsourced. Take a memo, mark it up, send it to the internet!

Via Torontoist, the story goes like this: the Toronto Star—Canada's largest daily circulation newspaper—is, like every other newspaper, starting to come to terms with how completely doomed it is. So they're going through the company's biggest restructuring in its history, offering buyouts to everyone in the company, and outsourcing both copy editing and pagination work. First of all, is pagination work really that hard? There are people at the New York Observer who write Very Short List, half of Transom, and do Kushner's taxes. Pussy Canadians. Learn from us.

But apparently, it is, or it's hard enough to require outsourcing. Also, they vaguely alluded to this nice gem:

The plans could expand to include editorial content and other production, he added.

So, you know when you call American Airlines and they pick up and they're like AMEERICKAN URLUNES CHALO DEES IZ, URR, BOB, OW CAN YOU BE HALPED PLEEZE? And you're like, Bob, I know you're name isn't Bob, and you're not picking up this call in Austin either, are you? Well, imagine what happens when they start outsourcing your editorial content to the same people who pick up American Airlines' numbers?

Or so was the thought process of a certain Toronto Star editor, who took a memo written by the Star's publisher, John Cruickshank, to the editorial staff, and showed Cruickshank just how much they need their in-house copy-editors by leaking it to Torontoist. Observe:

LEDE!! indeed. If anything, this only serves to remind me how patently annoying copy editors are. Besides, isn't that what #commenters are for? Punctuation Nazis, all of them, imposing their draconian rules on the beautiful words of beautiful writers with flowing hair and long, circumspect...typing fingers. But from a publisher's standpoint, they might, you know, come in handy every once in a while. Like when you're writing a doomsday memo to your staff.