Spacing does NOT have a blind spot for postering.
This is disenguous. Your very first issue had as its cover a wooden, staple-pocked pole cleared of posters with a headline to the effect that a clean city was not worth stifling freedom of speech. That's the tone you set. You realize that by coming out with such a stance, you gave the impression (deliberate or not) that you support postering, which can take in everything from lost cat ads to the hundreds of ads put up by Think in Spanish, Best Body, big box nightclubs (looking at you, Guvernment), and other assorted lowlifes. Again, perhaps not your intent, but that seems to be what has happened. Now we have a downtown that looks like my email junk folder.
Now if, as you say, you aren't supportive of illegal, obnoxious commercial postering, why don't you return to the issue of said postering, and come out with a firm stance that "street spamming" on the part of companies like nightclubs, essay mills, boot camps, and other businesses is, in fact, a
threat to public spaces, and that the city should take all measures it can to eliminate it (such as spreading the Downtown Yonge BIA model of street furniture maintenance) and thereby be on the side of angels rather than shady internet businesses who seem determined to wallpaper the city with their junk.
Your silence on this issue implies acceptance, and for good or ill, your opinion on this will be influential. If Spacing says commerical postering is wrong, that the city should crack down on it, it will then be a Nixon-goes-to-China moment, and I think an initiative on the part of the city to really crack down on spam postering will be supported in ways it wouldn't be if someone from the right initiated it, with the inevitable whining - from certain elements who no doubt support your publication - about the "sterilization" and "suburbanization" of public spaces.
Can't have it both ways, can we? Do you really want a city covered in "Booty Camp fitness" posters, nightclub ads, and other ad crap, and then at the same time say you are opposed to ad creep in public spaces with a straight face? Do you not see the inherent contradiction in that? If so, then you *must*, as an organization, take a stance on this. Because if you don't, then in my eyes, and in the eyes of many others, you are hypocrites with a blind spot to this practice.