I was struck, wandering through the renovated Art Gallery of Ontario yesterday, by contrast. At a time when the newspaper industry is so much in trouble that no one seems willing to predict where the bottom might be, I checked out Ken Thomson’s donation to the gallery, worth several hundreds of millions — roughly the amount of immediate debt the New York Times was struggling to deal with before Carlos Slim stepped in.
Of course, Thomson’s money wasn’t all newspapers. The comparison is hardly a fair one. But it’s tempting for the strength of the contrast, and the notion that there may never be such a thing as a new-media mogul.