Even as their readers move on-line and their advertisers look elsewhere, daily newspapers continue to be our main source of information, shaping citizens' understanding of the world, and their reactions to events. At the same time, continuing a long-term trend in media ownership, newsrooms have been gutted as new owners prioritize double-digit profit margins. Dwindling reporting staff is able to do less and less actual reporting, as they become more and more reliant on official releases and carefully tailored public relations handouts.
In Media Parasite, Marc Edge takes Canada's dominant newspaper chain, Postmedia, as a case study laying bare the changes in news economics that over the past two generations have hollowed out the nation's newsrooms, undermining not just citizens' trust in what is reported to them, but the very foundations of a democracy steered by an informed electorate.

A native of Greater Vancouver, Marc Edge began his newspaper career as a writer at the Province in 1974. He later worked in the business section of the Calgary Herald, and in 1982 completed a Master of Labor and Industrial Relations degree at Michigan State University. He was BC Supreme Court reporter for the Province for ten years before accepting a Southam buyout offer in 1993. From 1995 to 1997, he sailed his forty-foot ketch Markenurh around the Pacific. He completed a PhD in Mass Communication from the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University in 2001, and is Assistant Professor in the School of Communication Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He can be contacted by e-mail at pacificpress@hotmail.com.

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