Beyond the Palewall (9)

 

 This is another in a series about news items of which you should be aware. For those who prefer a table of contents: 1) The first story is about yet another Canadian apology and we may soon have offered one to every group that has been offended. I don't think the apologies are being done alphabetically, since the last one was to the Italians. For more about that, see my post "Apologizing Again", where you will learn there is even a book about such a subject: A Guilted Age: Apologies for the Past. If you feel traumatized by long ago events or feel guilty about something that happened in the last century, you should have a look. 2) This one is about children now allowed outside in Toronto. I have also dealt with this issue in an insightful piece about "Children and Risk." 3) This one will be useful since you probably don't have a local newspaper to read and 4) A very interesting piece about the shootings occurring outside of theatres in Canada where people supposedly don't have guns. Even more interesting are the comments posted by readers of the articles, who apparently are not thrilled with the current government or sold on the virtues or multiculturalism. 

1) Apology Parity

“B.C. To Apologize For Historical Treatment of Doukhobor Sect,” Mike Hager, Globe and Mail, Jan. 31, 2024.

Back in the middle of the last century about 200 children were seized “ from their parents in southeastern British Columbia and sent to the New Denver residential school by the province after their sect, known as the Sons of Freedom, refused to send them to public school. The tiny group had broken away from Canada’s Doukhobor population, a religious group that settled in the region and Saskatchewan after they were banished from Russia in the late 19th century for their pacifist views, rejection of the Orthodox Church and refusal to participate in the military.”

They will now be getting an apology:

“B.C. Attorney-General Niki Sharma’s office confirmed a public apology to the survivors, who may number about 75, and their families will be made Thursday in Castlegar. A corresponding proposal for financial reparations is expected by the descendants of the Sons of Freedom community.”

B.C. Ombudsperson, Jay Chalke, says the  "government’s apology needs to be “unconditional, clear and public.”

He said he has also communicated to the Attorney-General that the wider community needs to be compensated, as well as the individuals who were sent to the New Denver residential school and their progeny.

“Clearly there has been intergenerational trauma from the events that happened in the 1950s and I don’t think government should be seen to have the amount of compensation they pay reduced through their own delay,” he said in a phone interview.”

2) Children Allowed to Play Again: The Return of PLUCK
 [There will be no image of children playing since it might be too disturbing for some.]

                      Playing Even Sanctioned by The Toronto Star

   “'We Aren't Talking About Sending Them Into Busy Streets or Near Rough Water.' Canadian Paediatric Society Recommends Risky Play for Kids, Toronto Star, Jan. 25, 2024

"Unstructured outdoor play, in particular risky play, is essential for the physical, mental and social development of children, according to new recommendations from the Canadian Paediatric Society."

"We have to reframe how we view risk and understand that risk is a part of life and it's a part of our children's lives," said Dr. Suzanne Beno, a paediatric emergency medicine physician at SickKids, chair of the injury prevention committee of the

CPS, and author of the guidance document released Thursday.”

The new recommendations say children should be kept "as safe as necessary, not as safe as possible," and land on the heels of a tussle in Toronto over whether the city should be closing tobogganing hills that have served neighbourhoods for generations....

The city has closed 45 hills this year, due to concerns about hazards including trees, wading pools, stairs and benches. It maintains a list of toboggan runs it considers safe.

Risky play helps build physical and mental health and resilience among children and youth and can help prevent or manage conditions like obesity, anxiety and behavioural issues, according to the CPS."

For the actual CPS report see:  "Healthy Childhood Development Through Outdoor Risky Play: Navigating the Balance with Injury Prevention.”

                   Playing No Longer Condemned by the CBC

   The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation imprimatur guarantees that a reasonable bit of playing should be allowed while wearing helmets.

   "Pop the Bubble Wrap and let Kids Play Outdoors, Pediatricians Say:

Pediatricians Encourage Parents to Allow Children to Take Risks, Even if it Leads to Minor Cuts, Bruises," Amina Zafar · CBC News · Posted: Jan 25, 2024

"The group said opportunities for risky play fell over recent decades as unscheduled free play outside gave way to planned activities. Now, kids spend more time indoors, often on screens.

The 2022 Participaction report card gave Canadian children a grade of D overall for physical activity and a D– for active play.

"It's the move away from helicopter parenting, from over-parenting, over-scheduling and the recognition that it's probably healthy and good for kids to be kids and to be allowed to experience developmentally and age-appropriate challenges."

3) News Deserts - Oases Shrinking

   Weekly a writer for The Atlantic sends out a newsletter, “Up for Debate.” In a recent one he asked his readers to respond to this question: “What is the state of local journalism where you live, and how does it affect your community?” There were many replies, all lamenting the loss of local reporting. Here is one from close-by Pennsylvania and, with a change of newspaper names, it could probably have come from any province in Canada.

"There are four newspapers covering a county of about 150,000 people. On paper, we’re not a news desert by a long shot. But the reality is we’re a de facto news desert because our newspapers are zombies. Three of the four newspapers are owned by Gannett, which, according to the online staff directories of the Chambersburg Public Opinion, Greencastle Echo Pilot, and Waynesboro Record Herald, employs exactly two journalists across all three newsrooms, which sporadically cover local government. The Echo Pilot lists no staff at all. The fourth newspaper, the Mercersburg Journal, is print-only and owned by a local chain. It covers our borough council and other local events in our tiny town reasonably well, and local officials tend to be extremely aware that what they say and do could end up in the paper the following Wednesday. For me, that’s evidence that traditional dead-tree news remains essential, though I wonder how sustainable it is.”

  This is a very important subject. For more about it see:

In Canada: Local News Research Project.

For the United States:

Northwestern University: The State of Local News Project.

University of North Carolina: Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media. 

4) Shoot-Out at the Cineplex Corral

  "Cineplex Pulls South Indian Film Following Drive-by Shootings at GTA Movie Theatres," Alex Nino Gheciu, The Canadian Press, Jan.30, 2024
TORONTO - Cineplex has cancelled screenings of a South Indian film following four drive-by shootings at theatres throughout the Greater Toronto Area the day it premiered.
       Coming Soon To A Cinema Near You
   "Cineplex Pulls South Indian film Screenings After Incidents of Threats, Intimidation and Talk of Turf War," Joe Castaldo, Globe and Mail, Jan.31, 2024.
   "Movie exhibitors including Cineplex Inc. CGX-T -1.70% have pulled screenings of a South Indian-language film across Canada after individuals opened fire at four cinemas in the Greater Toronto Area last week, the latest incidents of intimidation related to Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam blockbusters.
   Videos obtained by The Globe and Mail show a person in a hoodie shooting a gun multiple times through the passenger window of a vehicle at the entrances of Cineplex locations in Scarborough and Vaughan. In a separate video, the driver of the vehicle fires at a Cineplex in Brampton. York Cinemas, a theatre in Richmond Hill, Ont., was also hit by gunfire. The shootings shattered glass and left bullet holes in windows. According to York Regional Police, the incidents occurred in the early morning hours, when the theatres were closed….
   Film distributors have contended that a turf war is being waged and that a group of individuals is trying to control the lucrative market for South Indian-language films in Canada, using vandalism and intimidation to pressure theatres and distributors to drop certain titles and ensure the films run in favoured cinemas.
   In recent years, Telugu and Malayalam movies have been affected, too. The Globe has found more than 20 incidents at Cineplex locations, independent theatres and other chains such as Landmark Cinemas across Southern Ontario, Ottawa, Montreal, Calgary, Edmonton and Surrey, B.C.
  In December, noxious substances were sprayed inside three GTA Cineplex theatres, forcing audience members to evacuate.
The illustration above is the poster for the currently contentious film, Malaikottai Vaaliban. As far as I can determine, it is not necessarily the film that is problematic, but rather the issue of who gets to decide which South Asian films should be shown. 

Newsprint

 

From the Washington Post

   "Newsprint" is the name of a feature provided by the Washington Post. I received an email about it at the end of November and it is from that email that the graphic above was taken. Now at least I know how I spent some of my time in 2022.  

   Apparently I am both opinionated and stylish, since the opinion and style sections were the top two consulted by me. Sports took third place, which surprises me since I would have thought it would have ranked well below "Entertainment", which is often the section I click on first, because it includes the reviews and articles about "Books." 

   The folks at the Post then suggested that those readers with tastes similar to mine also enjoyed the "Tech Friend Newsletter" and they provided me with some other articles I may have missed. It was indicated to me that I am a loyal reader of the pieces produced by Timothy Bella, whose name I did not recognize, and it was suggested that I might also want to check out Kim Bellware, of whom who I was also unaware.  I gather I will receive more information about my reading habits as our relationship develops.

   A purpose of all this is, I suppose, to encourage our relationship, and the data collected will probably result in me receiving more notes from the WP indicating there are other articles I have missed that will appeal to a guy like me. Unlike the old paper on newsprint, the publishers of it now know what is being read and how long we spend on each article. Knowing such things allows the editors to see what is really popular and to point that out so that the article becomes even more popular and, on some newspaper sites, remains on the "front page" for days. The bad news is that more froth is likely to be produced and rise to the top, while well-written, heavier items related to obscure subjects will sink and eventually disappear. 

Good News From the Washington Post

   There used to be newspapers which were printed on paper and, on Sunday in the United States, were massive bundles, helpful for those who had hangovers. I had many of those while living in the Washington area in the 1960s and relied heavily on the WP. Unfortunately I once took the paper with me on a bus trip to fulfill a military obligation in Norfolk and was wearing 'whites', the bottom portion of which was blackened by the ink. 

   There even used to be thick printed sections which were essentially mini-magazines, one of which was known as "Book World", but when the advertising started to disappear, so did the book review tabloids. Long essays about books were lost, along with those who could make a living reviewing them. In 2009, the Washington Post stopped printing "Book World" because, “The advertising in Book World didn’t justify the amount of space that we dedicated each week to books coverage,” Marcus Brauchli, executive editor of The Post, said in a phone interview."

   Well, that is really bad news, but there is some good news to note since this fall it was announced that, 

"Starting this week, we begin something new and revive something beloved. I’m thrilled to say that "Book World" returns in print after a long hiatus. In 2009, the print edition closed, and books coverage appeared in separate sections, "Outlook" and "Style." We are now reuniting our books staff to produce enhanced online coverage all week and a print edition on Sundays." ("Reintroducing Book World: The Washington Post's Books Section Starts a New Chapter, in Print Every Sunday and With a Refurbished and Revitalized Presence Online," John Williams, WP, Sept. 21, 2022.)

Part of the "revitalization" consists of an email which subscribers will receive each week from Ron Charles, bearing the title - "The Washington Post Book Club." Many of the 1400+ articles I read would have been produced by him or fellow critic, Michael Dirda.

Bad News From the Washington Post

   More recently the news is again bleak, although one would think that Mr. Bezos, the owner of the WP, would have the resources to host a grand Christmas office party for the staff. If there is an office party, there will be fewer staff to attend it and the mood on the 25th will be grim since that is the last day the WP's "Sunday Magazine" will appear. For this bad news see: "The Washington Post Will End Its Sunday Magazine, Eliminate Positions," Sara Ellison, Nov. 30, 2022. 

"The Washington Post will stop publishing its stand-alone print magazine, one of the last of its kind in the country and which has been published under different names for more than six decades, the newspaper’s executive editor, Sally Buzbee, announced Wednesday.

The Sunday magazine has 10 staff members, who were told in a meeting that their positions have been eliminated, according to Shani George, The Post’s vice president for communications.

“We will end the print Sunday Magazine in its current form as we continue to undergo our global and digital transformation,” Buzbee said in a subsequent email to staff early Wednesday afternoon. She noted that “we will be shifting some of the most popular content, and adding more, in a revitalized Style section that will launch in the coming months.”

“We deeply appreciate the contributions this staff has made to our print readers over the years,” she wrote in conclusion.

The Post launched the magazine in its current form in 1986, though it had published a print Sunday magazine for the previous quarter century. The magazine is distributed with copies of the Sunday paper. Its last issue will publish on Dec. 25, Buzbee said.

  In this instance, popularity did not seem to matter since five of the forty most popular stories in the WP, are found in the magazine. Nor does the quality of the articles make a difference since the Pulitzer was won for some of them. There are now few such magazines left:

"Along with the Boston Globe and New York Times, The Post had been one of the few remaining newspapers to publish a weekly magazine. They were once popular features for major metropolitan dailies — “prime real estate for long-form newspaper features, especially as they were surrounded by gorgeous ads for expensive condos and watches,” said Bill Grueskin, a professor at Columbia Journalism School and a former editor for the Miami Herald and Wall Street Journal. “Those ads have largely disappeared from most newspapers, and so have the magazines.”

And although newspaper journalists once craved the opportunity to write at magazine length, “that’s less of a priority now, given the infinite space available online,” he said."

   About the situation at the Post there have been conflicting headlines, some positive and others negative. But, here is one of the latest ones and it is likely to best describe the mood of the employees: "Holiday Gloom at The Washington Post," Erik Wemple, Dec. 17. The "economic head winds" continue blowing across the news deserts and soon there will be few print newspapers left and likely no local ones at all. 

The Bonus: 

"The Washington Post recorded nearly 68 million unique visitors across its digital platforms in August 2022, up 7 percent month-on-month."

Quote of the Week (1)

 It has been sad to see our local newspapers disappear. The loss is not ours alone. As Tom Zoellner points out in the quotation below this map, those who follow will know much less about us. 

News Deserts

“What were we doing with all those shorter items we slammed into the paper, however imperfectly, was logging a record of events into the permanent memory of the nation. Crack open any civic history at the bibliography, and odds are excellent that most of the details are sourced from the local paper. If we didn’t publish it, it might as well have never happened, so far as future consciousness is concerned. Now that a daily record of happenings is vanishing from America’s towns and cities, so with it will come amnesia. The stack of newspapers that mattered most, and which we spent no time thinking about, was delivered to the library archives. Future urban historians will come across an abundance of detail about virtually every town and city in the U.S. up until the first decade of the twenty-first century, when the record starts to trail off and the permanent record of what happened across America begins to disappear like brain cells under attack. How far this new Dark Age will last is, as yet, unknown. The COVID-19 lockdown and recession tore through an already feeble business, killing dozens of newspapers that had served their towns for more than a hundred years and leaving the civic lights dimmed, perhaps permanently.”

From: “Late City Final,” in The National Road, by Tom Zoellner, pp.133-134.

The answer here in London, for the London Free Press, is the Postmedia Network, and much of the content in it looks very much like that found in other Postmedia papers across the country.

The Bonus:

The maps above relate to the U.S., but the situation is similar in Canada. A good source for data is the Local News Research Project at Ryerson University's School of Journalism.

Factlet (5)

The Opioid Epidemic

   

       A review of this book presents a few factlets worth noting:

“Eyre begins with the story of a single pharmacy in Kermit, W.Va., population 382. In just two years in the mid-aughts, the Sav-Rite distributed nearly nine million opioid pain pills to its customers. People drove hundreds of miles to get there, passing dozens of other pharmacies on the way. Lines were so long that the pharmacy’s owner sold popcorn and hot dogs to people in the drive-through lane.”

   "Eyre calls the addiction crisis “a man-made disaster fueled by corporate greed and corruption.” Cardinal [a drug distributor]“saturated the state with hydrocodone and oxycodone — a combined 240 million pills between 2007 and 2012. That amounted to 130 pain pills for every resident.” He writes: “The coal barons no longer ruled Appalachia. Now it was the painkiller profiteers.”

Deaths of Despair

   Right now we are preoccupied with the deaths and illnesses resulting from COVID-19, but the impact of despair should not be overlooked. It has been linked to the dramatic rise in drug overdoses, suicides and deaths caused by alcoholism. "In 2018, more than 158,000 Americans died from these causes, up from 65,000 in 1995, with increases that are similar for men and women." Among poor whites the historical patterns in longevity have been slowed or reversed. "From 2013 to 2017, life expectancy fell for white Americans, and from 2014 to 2017, it fell for all Americans, a setback that had not been seen since the influenza pandemic a century earlier." The current one won't help.

Deaths of Newspapers

   The author of Death in Mud Lick, won a Pulitzer Prize for the articles about the opioid epidemic in the Charleston Gazette. It was a family-owned newspaper for over 100 years and although it is not 'dead', it went bankrupt and was bought out and is now The Charleston Gazette-Mail. Supposedly, the unofficial motto of the paper is being kept - "sustained outrage over basic injustices" - and will still be an operating principle. We'll see.

Sources:

The review of Mud Lick is found in, "How Painkiller Pushers Took Over Coal Country, "by Dwight Garner, New York Times, April 6, 2020.

"Deaths of Despair" is a phrase coined by Anne Case and Angus Deacon back in 2015 and it is now in the title of their book: Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism.

There has been so much written about Deaths of Despair and the Death of Newspapers, you don't need much assistance from me. They even have their own Wikipedia categories: See "Diseases of Despair" and "Decline of Newspapers".
For a good article about despair see: "There's Something Terribly Wrong: Americans Are Dying Young at Alarming Rates," Joel Achenbach, Washington Post, Nov. 26, 2019
For dying newspapers see: "A Hedge Fund's 'Mercenary' Strategy: Buy Newspapers, Slash Jobs, Sell the Buildings," Jonathan O'Connell and Emma Brown, Washington Post, Feb. 11, 2019.

The Canadian Angle:
   North of the border, people are also dying of despair and many of our local newspapers are deader than the parrot in the Monty Python sketch.
   The first instance I found of the phrase "Deaths of Despair" is in this headline which appeared on The Canadian Press website back in the summer of 2016: "Deaths of Despair: Overdoses, Drinking, Suicides Hit Whites," by Mike Stobbe on June 3. (As a very caustic aside, some people who are non-white, of indeterminate gender, or in the higher income levels, have suggested that the culling of a cohort of poor white males is not a bad thing!)
   The most recent issue of "Canada's National Magazine," Maclean's (May 2020) has a full page ad which begins with a question in very large type: "HAS THE PRESCRIPTION OPIOID CRISIS AFFECTED YOU OR SOMEONE YOU KNOW? And, locally, if you search for information about class actions and opioids in Canada, you will find Siskinds. The cover of that issue of Maclean's consists of the headline, in very large type, "HOW DOES THIS END?, which is referring to the CORONAVIRUS, but it could refer to the other crises as well.
   I do not recall when our local paper, the London Free Press, died. I do recall that the publisher of the Davidson Leader out in Saskatchewan had an essay contest, the prize of which was the Davidson Leader, and the entry fee was $1 (and that would be a Canadian $ which is now worth about 12 cents.)
   The "News Deserts" are not just in Saskatchewan. For more on that subject see: For the U.S., the University of North Carolina.  For Canada see: Ryerson University.
    The problem of the loss of local news was recognized in Canada a few years ago and a large sum was promised: See: "Ottawa Bolsters Struggling Media With $600M in Tax Measures," The Canadian Press, November 21, 2018. There may now be more immediate concerns.

Factlet? You were expecting Factoid? For the important distinction see Factlet (1) - What's a Gee-Gee? 

Bonus Material:
In one of the pieces there is quote about the dying papers: "There is a morbid joke in this business: Every time we print an obituary, we lose another subscriber."
Remember when a good local newspaper motto would have been: "The job of the newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable."
This appears under the masthead of the Washington Post: "Democracy Dies in Darkness."