It's no secret that in an online age and an online society, it's becoming increasingly difficult to access local news, editorial opinion by real people, considered opinions and analysis by local columnists who are also real people, and so on.

I'm also rather old-fashioned in that I like to get a real newspaper, on real paper, that I can peruse at my leisure while I drink my morning coffee.

In theory, the Ottawa Citizen is supposed to deliver such a paper to us 5 days a week, Tuesdays through Saturdays.

Mind you, the newspaper is only a pale shadow of what it used to be. There are no more movie listings, no TV Guide, no want ads to speak of. Only two skinny sections Tuesday through Friday and four sections on Saturdays. No glossy supplements on the weekend either.

Now, however, we're lucky if they even deliver when they're supposed to. Today was one such no-paper day.

Even last year, if we got missed for any reason, we could make a single phone call and even if we didn't get hold of a real person, it was possible to key in a few details and get the message back "Your complaint has been registered and a paper will be delivered you as soon as possible." And it worked! We usually had a delivery person at the door within an hour.

But now, the recorded message is "Your complaint has been registered and your subscription will be extended." Ummm, I don't WANT a credit, I want the @#$%^ newspaper!!

The other message we keep getting is that we can still access the e-paper. But even that doesn't seem to work any more!!

Their slogan, displayed prominently on their editorial page, is "Fair Play and Daylight."

But if the delivery person does actually show up as scheduled on Tuesday morning, it certainly won't be daylight, since this is the weekend we "Spring ahead", making for some depressingly dark mornings for the foreseeable future!
When the media started promoting Meatless Mondays as a way to make a positive environmental difference, it didn't bother me as every day is meatless around here. Well, except for our stock of cat food. But Paperless Mondays? Another matter altogether.

Going paperless by going digital is also widely touted as the environmentally responsible choice. Maybe it is. We all have to weigh the pros and cons of our individual choices and I outlined a number of the cons to living digitally in a recent post. Threats to national sovereignty and opening the door to malicious cyberattacks, cyberbullying, loss of privacy and copyright protection, inattention to the fullness of real life as we key in PINs, walk with our eyes fixed upon mobile phones and other electronic devices, and so on and so forth. The power of writing something down in our own handwriting, atrocious as it may be, is not equal to that of keying in a 140-character, off-the-cuff remark that may haunt tweeters and their survivors for generations to come. All of which may strike you as ironic and even hypocritical, as here I am blithely tapping letters on to a laptop screen. But I digress.

What prompts today's entry is the fact that the Ottawa Citizen (along with some other papers in the same chain) have decided in their wisdom that we don't need a real, honest-to-goodness newspaper on Mondays any more. Nor do they need to reduce their subscription price accordingly because after all, we've got the e-paper! All I can say is e-gads! I hope they haven't reduced the wages they pay to their carriers either, who now get a well-deserved 2-day break from putting the paper in our box at 3AM!

On alternate Mondays, my partner and I get up early to go and buy a 2-week supply of groceries during the store's quiet hour (once reserved for health care workers and senior like us) from 7 to 8AM. But that means we don't catch all of Ottawa Morning on CBC Radio and now we can't even scan the headlines on The Citizen before we set off, or after we get back. Yes, I know. These are paltry considerations compared to those of folks who can't afford regular meals or even a permanent place to lay their heads at night. But dammit, it's disrupting our whole day-to-day routine!

Remember the whole thing of thinking globally and acting locally? Well, the discontinuing of the physical newspaper, along with other editorial decisions (also made globally, or at best nationally) have seriously undermined our ability to act locally. For example: movie listings have disappeared from the physical newspaper and even the e-paper. If we're considering going to a movie, we have to remember what all the cineplexes in town call themselves these days and then check movie times individually. Local businesses rarely advertise in the paper these days, probably realizing the futility of spending the money but failing to reach their target audience. But they're definitely suffering. We no longer get a TV guide with the paper, nor a weekend magazine. Classified ads are a shadow of their former selves. We still get some puzzles and comics but it's pretty generic now. And the comics have gone full-colour, but don't even credit their creators!

Along with all of the above, we've lost most of the even more locally focused papers like Metro, 24 Hours, 24 Heures, Dose, Rush Hour, etc. I guess we're lucky to still have a TV station with local news; people in smaller centres are probably not so fortunate.

You might say that globalization is a good thing: we want a world that's fair to all and an economy that, like our planet (and beyond), has no sentience of national and regional boundaries. But each of us is an individual. Our eyes naturally glaze over and we become overwhelmed if faced with huge numbers and tales of doom. We despair if we feel there's nothing we can do as individuals, families, groups of friends or neighbourhoods. Canadians of my generation will remember ventures like LIP (Local Initiatives Program) and OFY (Opportunities For Youth) that rewarded community-based, grassroots action. Will we ever get back to that mindset?
Today I'm wearing a T-shirt that I bought at the Ottawa Citizen's on-site boutique many, many years ago. It's not quite prehistoric ... except that it IS, in a way. On the front, it has two dinosaurs - one orange, the other green - and both are reading. The green one is reading a newspaper, La Brea Times; the orange one is reading a book (by Dinah Sor, of course) called Fossil Fuel in Your Future. The caption on the front of the shirt reads "READ. Avoid Extinction." On the back? Ottawa Citizen.

I've been reading the Citizen - or parts of it, anyway - since I first learned to read. Fair play and daylight have flowed into my home for many decades now.

I do think that local news is particularly important in pandemic conditions. Local news delivered to your mailbox or doorstep? An added bonus. I think that's where traditional media can really excel, and where they should focus their scarce resources. Thank heavens we still have the infrastructure there for daily newsPAPER delivery. Now, if we could only restore door to door mail! Those community mailboxes are rather an anachronism now, aren't they, given how many businesses, faced with having to close their doors (some no doubt permanently), are actually offering FREE delivery to the local community?!

I was rather peeved when CBC TV cut its local newscast a few days after Covid 19 hit the capital. I miss seeing Lucy van Oldenbarneveld, Adrian Harewood, Ian Black and all the others. In protest I have now turned to CTV, which offers local newscasts weekdays from 5 to 7PM and weekends from 6PM.

To be sure, I want national and international news too, and the news sources I've just mentioned are by no means limited to what's happening in the local community. But when you're no longer free to explore at random, the news that's of most immediate importance is likely the hours of availability of your local grocery and drug stores!
I do! Seriously, I scarcely recognize the Ottawa Citizen since they revamped it about a month ago.

For starters... don't most people want to see front-page news on the front page? Or at least in the first few pages? There doesn't seem to be any international news at all in that first section any more - instead, the first section is "politics and the public service", generally at the national level. OK, so I know this is a government town - but have we become that insular?

Then there are the bizarre names for the sections. "Context"? "You"? I guess we live in an age when everything starts with either i or u - iPods, iPads, iMacs, youtube... unless of course it's e- as in e-mail, e-books and e-zines!

They've also fired dear Abby and mucked about with the comics and puzzles pages. No more Sally Forth, Rose is Rose, Classic Peanuts or For Better or Worse (though to be fair, those last two were all reruns anyway). No more Dilbert or Doonesbury. I do quite like having Bizarro, Rhymes with Orange and The Other Coast but would cheerfully dispense with Hagar the Horrible, Family Circus and Hi & Lois. Maybe they could bring back a few golden oldies like Cathy or Calvin & Hobbes? Even Mary Worth and Brenda Starr were good for a few campy laughs!

Then there are the puzzles. No more Canadian Cyberquotes - I used to do those every day without fail. In fact there's very little Canadian content of any kind - it's much more generic. They even tried to get rid of the North of 49 crossword on Saturdays but brought it back after some protests from readers. Even so, it's in much smaller type now, further alienating the paper-paper's main demographic fan base! When they got rid of the Sunday paper, I guess I knew in my heart of hearts that they wouldn't keep giving us double puzzles on Saturdays forever but some of these changes really seem to defy reason.

To be fair, I haven't explored some of the new e-features (there's that awful prefix again) like 6PM updates pushed to your iPad (mainly because I don't have an iPad).
I don't think I'm exactly e-illiterate but I do object to being expected to constantly multitask and skim the surface and not being allowed to go into anything in any depth
any more. Seems to me a good portion of the younger generations have the attention span of a flea.

Is ADD/ADHD the new normal?
Ever since I can remember (maybe even since the paper began), the Ottawa Citizen has put the slogan "Fair Play and Daylight" at the top of its Editorial page. But I've never been sure quite what it meant.

Fair play is certainly important, in the newspaper business as in any other. You don't want to be guilty of libel or promoting hatred; and if you're going to credibly express one point of view, presumably you have to at least have considered some opposing viewpoints before rejecting them for one reason or another. What about daylight? I suppose one function of journalism is to bring to light important issues that some stakeholders would like to shut in a dark closet; another might be to shed additional light on issues of which many of us may be only dimly aware.

Which brings me to the broader issue of daylight, quite apart from the Citizen's slogan. And specifically, Daylight Saving Time. I haven't really researched the matter much, but my understanding is that DST was first introduced during wartime, when street signs were all taken down to confuse the enemy and blackout regulations were in effect after dark. And I believe that during at least part of World War II, Double Daylight Time was introduced to further hoard and make the most of those scarce and precious daytime hours. But is this kind of semiannual time-switching still relevant today?

When I was little, we basically had six months of Standard Time followed by six months of Daylight Time. We changed the clocks on the last Saturday of April and the last Saturday of October. A couple of decades later, it was decided that we should switch to daylight time on the FIRST Saturday in April, but keep the same date for switching back to standard time. So in effect, it was daylight time that was now "standard", since we were on it for nearly seven months of the year. When the U.S. decided to move up daylight time to March, and so-called Standard Time into November, we meekly tagged along. So now, we "spring" ahead before spring has arrived even OFFICIALLY(i.e. at the vernal equinox), let alone actually (which around here is usually several weeks later)! We have a mere four months or so of "standard" time followed by eight months of daylight time.

Strangely, it seems that during these decades, people have been steadily shifting towards doing things earlier in the day, so that the whole point of daylight savings has been thwarted. People start and finish their work-days earlier than they used to. Instead of 9-to-5 or 10-to-6, it's 8-to-4 or 7-to-3. Kids typically used to begin their school day at 9 AM; now many of them start at 8:00 or even earlier. So on bleak March mornings after the clocks have changed, young children and teens are staggering bleary-eyed out of bed and off to school when it's still dark outside!

There is ample evidence out there that constantly shifting back and forth, as well as being forced to be up and about in the dark, has a detrimental effect on our circadian rhythms, our eating and sleeping patterns, our mood, and so forth, and makes us all more accident-prone as a result. So why don't we all follow Saskatchewan's example and call a halt to this madness?

This evening at 8:30 PM EDT, we (along with other participating cities in other time zones) are being encouraged to turn off the lights and play board games by candlelight to observe "Earth Hour". While I sometimes yearn myself for a simpler, more unplugged way of life, I'm sceptical that observing Earth Hour is going to do much of anything to conserve energy or save the planet. I mean, if you really want to save energy, why not just go to bed at 8:30 tonight?

Oh wait, I remember - it's because then we'll be wanting to get up too earlly tomorrow, when it's still dark out!
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