blogcutter

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?

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?