![]() LONDON, ONTARIO – In a year when I have been assailed by too many wrenching farewells, I notched up a lesser but still poignant cutting of a different kind of cord this week; this one carried out – after a decade’s worth of oscillating consideration and resistance – by my own volition. You probably won’t need to sit down to safely absorb this bulletin so I’ll just come out and declare it forthwith. After almost fifty years of faithful readership (and forty years of occasionally interrupted writership) I have cancelled my subscription to The London Free Press. I know; shocking, isn’t it? Indeed, most of my friends will be extending no sympathy whatsoever for this latest severing but instead will roll their eyes in mystification and inquire: “What took you so long?” When I signed on for that subscription back in 1979, most of the households on our block received the paper as well. With my late-breaking defection, there now remains a grand total of one subscriber on our avenue; a retired gentleman of at least my vintage. From an actuarial perspective, this wouldn’t seem to portend a very bright future for southwestern Ontario’s foremost, English language, daily newspaper. As they only produce five anemic editions per week nowadays . . . and as my long-pondered cancellation was finally triggered by their exasperating failure most weeks to successfully deliver more than three or four of those issues to my door . . . can we even still call the Free Press a daily?
In addition to wanting to support a local newspaper on principle (however lame its current product might be) I expect that my neighbor, like me, was raised on books and physical publications and doesn’t like what it does to our eyeballs and attention spans when we’re glued to screens all day. Younger generations, as you may have noticed, don’t seem to share this aversion. Indeed, they can get tetchy if you ask them to put their devices away when you’re sitting down with them at dinner. But knowing the resistance of people of all ages to pay for anything they access on the interwebs, I doubt there are hordes of younger bucks on our or any other block picking up the circulatory slack by subscribing to the Freeps’ e-edition. The vast majority of our friends discarded their Free Press subscriptions a long time ago. And for the sake of honesty, I should probably drop this talk about our ‘household’ and ‘we’. My wife carefully devours each weekly edition of the Epoch Times that lands on our porch but hasn’t gone near the Freeps for about ten years unless I flagged some item I thought she’d want to know about and set it right in front of her. More often than not those selected tidbits were an obituary or – back before the Wuhan Batflu Psychosis hollowed out our civilization and rendered most forms of social intercourse inadvisable – a notice regarding a church bazaar or concert or art exhibition. Back in the day, I used to regard it as a sort of requirement of citizenship to take the newspaper. I couldn’t imagine how any Londoner without a subscription would attain an adequate grasp of local issues so as to equip himself to cast a discerning ballot or understand in any depth how our city functions. But with the relentless jettisoning of writers whose job it was to keep on top of beats that they actually comprehended, that hasn’t been the case for a long time. Along with that shrinkage of what gets covered, there has been a narrowing of editorial latitude at the Freeps that is most depressing to behold. When Post Media bought the paper in 2015, I was briefly hopeful that the range of editorial opinion might expand to take in some of the more conservative views that enliven the National Post. But such worthy scribes as John Robson, Conrad Black, Barbara Kay or the great Rex Murphy (who died earlier this year) never had their columns picked up by the Free Press. When asked in recent years why I still subscribed to the rag, I was down to three pretty pathetic reasons. One was the Jumble puzzle which I can usually complete in less than five minutes and keeps me in good fighting trim for Scrabble tournaments. The Epoch Times carries one of those puzzles each week (along with a selection of other crosswords and word games) so I don’t quite have to go cold turkey on that. Another is the aforementioned obituaries. Having lived in London for seventy-two years now, it’s rare that a week goes by without coming across a death notice of at least one person I know. But the commonest day for our delivery person to somehow forget that our house exists is Saturday and that’s the day which has by far the largest roundup of death notices. And my third reason is loyalty. As an op/ed columnist, arts reviewer and features writer, I was a regular freelance contributor for thirty-five years with the paper. For about twenty-five of those years, the Free Press supplied the lion’s share of my annual income and, in the great overarching scheme of things, made it possible for me to realize one of the great dreams of my life; to make a go of it as an entirely self-directed writer in a medium-sized city that I loved. The money was never as good as if I’d been on staff but I almost always had the pleasure of writing stuff that I was actually interested in. When I took over as editor of Scene magazine in the ‘90s, the Free Press stopped publishing me for a few years which I thought was pretty small of them. I came back on board when Sun Media took over in 1997 and I was one of about ten local freelancers with regular gigs. For a few years around the turn of the century, the paper was published seven days a week for the only time in its long history. Then when Quebecor bought Sun Media, it wasn’t too bad at first but by about 2005, layoffs and cost cutting measures and staff buyouts were becoming pretty drastic. Indeed, I think a case could be made that for all the ballyhoo and optimistic projections that invariably attend amalgamations and buyouts, they are ultimately self-devouring manoeuvres that bode ill for the health of the fourth estate. The Free Press and I parted ways for good when a rogue publisher named Bruce Monck entered my life and I became the founding editor of The London Yodeller in late 2013. I can’t say that second sacking had a huge impact on my life as the Freeps had already become a shadow of its former self and was only taking one column from me every three weeks by then. And for the next three years The Yodeller was my final and all-time happiest home as a print journalist. We had so much fun and even though we were only a fortnightly, we cleaned the Free Press’ clock with our arts coverage and the sizzle and verve of our columnists. I suppose you could say, “Well, big deal, HG. The Free Press is still here and The Yodeller isn’t.” True enough. But what I seem to have finally determined this week is that when it comes to local newspapers, just being there – like a not very interesting lump on a decaying log – isn’t enough. Some related Hermaneutics readings: From June 8, 2020, on my initiation into the world of The London Free Press: https://www.hermangoodden.ca/blog/farewell-to-londons-man-of-letters From January 18, 2021, a paean to a more enlightened system of newspaper distribution: https://www.hermangoodden.ca/blog/once-a-paperboy
5 Comments
max
17/10/2024 08:09:57 am
Just read a whole blurb about The Epoch Times on their website Herman. I know I'm far too cynical about the use of words like censorship, liberty and truth. Liberty and truth are not happening in China, where the magazine originated . But America! I know the right there complain often and bitterly they are being gagged, silenced, cancelled even by political correctness. American conservatives over the last few years have written and published 700 or so books telling us all about it. I assume the same lack of censorship exists in the countries speaking the couple of dozen other languages they publish in. In Europe they support the far right, up to and including Germany's Neo-Nazis. I'm reassured Herman that your house's links to conservative thought are as strong as ever. But Herm, American Communism is surely an Oxymoron. A people who worship money. John Steinbeck said "Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires". Yet here is the Epoch saving America from communism though Trump does accuse Kamala of being a "Marxist, communist fascist" all in one.
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17/10/2024 08:24:56 am
As a fellow "former Freeps columnist" I share your concerns, and your abandonment of the paper as a reliable news source. I was a fairly regular contributor for more than 20 years and greatly enjoyed the opportunity to share my slightly-right-of-centre opinions, and initiate dialogues with a wide variety of readers of all social and political stripes. They were good days, and I'd be lying if I said I don't miss them from time to time. I am of the firm (even if it's misguided) belief that both local newspapers and local radio outlets would have a better chance of long-term survival if they restored their focus on the communities they purport to serve, and provided local news, content and commentary from actual members of the community. Just sayin........
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Douglas Cassan
17/10/2024 10:26:33 pm
Asa news junkie and former editor of a small city daily I must admit to having jettisoned theFreeps a decade ago. Increasingly poor home delivery service and declining quality were the reasons. Today I subscribe to several online newspapers including the wonderful National Post, Mop and Pail, New York Times andTheGuardian; but not the Free Press. I find local death notices by Googling London Obits and get major local news via the CTV and CBC websites. My prediction is that our Free Press will be online available online and be staffed entirely byWestern U journalism students before the end of this decade.
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John Eberhard
31/10/2024 01:13:13 am
Hello Herman
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Bill Myles
18/11/2024 02:44:38 pm
I gave up the local paper (of which there are two) a couple of years ago, We´re unique in Gavle, in Sweden, I believe, in still having two local rags, (formerly left respectively right oriented), They´re now both owned by the same conglomerate, and pretty much only useful for strictly local news. They even share the same sports and entertainment sections. I started subscribing to the Epoch Times after my latest visit with you and Kirtley. I´d given up on the state sponsored TV stations quite a while back, although I do check out the latest propaganda on Text TV since I kan click past the worst of it.
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