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John Honderich, the chair of Torstar, has a problem: His flagship publication, the largest metro daily in the country by circulation, is dying. And hardly anyone cares.

The Toronto Star is not flat-lining (I hope). But it has been shedding newsroom staff at an alarming rate, from 470 a decade ago to 170 now. And it’s not that absolutely zero persons, anywhere, give a hoot: The members of the Commons Heritage Committee, who have been hearing testimony about the travails of Canada’s newspaper industry, presumably care. It’s their job to care, after all.

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But generally speaking, as big issues go, this one barely registers. It’s below Montreal’s pit bull ban. It’s below cute animal videos. It’s a thermocline layer below Donald Trump’s soft-porn cameo. We know this, naturally, because there’s so little chatter about it on Facebook and Twitter.

The phenomenon isn’t limited to Honderich’s Star, of course. Postmedia chief executive Paul Godfrey shared essentially the same story with the heritage committee last spring, not long after the company merged newsrooms in markets where it owns two daily newspapers, and laid off 90 staff.