Ain't that how it always goes. You never know what you've got 'til it's gone. (Or something like that. I don't have any Joni Mitchell in my collection.)
So it was last week, which I spent in the coffee-bar mecca known as Kingston in search of some perspective on a variety of fronts, including local media offerings. What I discovered did not always reflect positively on the Ottawa scene, but on the whole, it would appear that things at home could be a whole lot worse.
The most obvious point of comparison would be the daily newspapers. Kingston, like just about every other North America city its size, has just one, the once-venerable Whig-Standard. The paper's halcyon days under pseudo-iconoclast Neil Reynolds, when reporters might be dispatched to Afghanistan and weekend reading could challenge the prejudices of even the most erudite reader, are rapidly fading memories.
Reynolds left a couple of years back when the Southam chain added the daily to its stable. He now runs a pair of New Brunswick dailies for the same people who refuse to pay the cost of raising their oil- and PCB-laden barge, the Irving Whale, from the bottom of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Still, I doubt Reynolds would rather be back at the Whig, working for Southam barons Conrad Black and Paul Desmarais, considering what's become of his former pride and joy.
With just a dozen editorial staffers, the best one could argue is that the Whig is about as good as can be expected. It looks nice, but the content, sad to report, compares favorably only with the likes of USA Today. For example, a recent "Special Report" on regional government consisted of just two stories totaling no more than 800 words. I have rarely seen such absurdly tight writing -- so tight I felt as if I had just finished a plate of Chinese food. It tasted fine, but a half hour later I was hungry again.
The Ottawa Citizen went through its own tight-as-can-be phase, but the editors soon came to their senses and today's menu includes a respectable sampling of lengthy and brief items. And even at its tightest, the Citizen was never as shallow as the Whig has become.
Management and staff at the Whig both complain that they simply don't have the resources, but I don't know. What's so expensive about letting writers write?
To make matters worse, Kingston readers of that almost trusty Canadian fall-back to every local daily, the Globe and Mail, get the Toronto edition, rather than the national edition most non-Torontonians receive. Call me crazy, but I suspect Kingstonians don't really care too much about the evening's theatre line-up in the big smoke.
That's two points for Ottawa.
Kingston wins one back thanks to Cablenet, its local cable television service, . Connecting a coaxial cable to a radio produces 28 stations in Kingston, about three times as many as Ottawa. And the best of the lot from a news hound's point of view is the National Public Radio station from Syracuse, NY.
Your basic NPR affiliate is not the CBC. But it shares more than just a lack of advertising and a familiar line-up of English-speaking foreign correspondents. The music tends to be second only to CBC Stereo when it comes to classical and jazz, but the real gem is the news service. Gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Whitewater hearings in Washington, D.C., which is the daytime staple on NPR these days, may be about as exciting as doing the dishes, but it's more deserving than what CNN and Newsworld are pumping out. The basic issues are the nature of the Clintons' involvement in the failure of an Arkansas bank and the suspicious circumstances of the apparent suicide of one of their advisers soon after the story started getting hot. Sounds more important than O.J. to me.
Rogers Cable in Ottawa does not offer an NPR station, even though, according to the president of Kingston's Cablenet, there's no technical, legal or regulatory obstacle preventing any cable service from pulling an NPR station off a satellite signal and slapping it on their basic package. Hell, even cable subscribers in Yellowknife get an NPR station -- though the Los Angeles weather reports do seem a bit up there come November.
Summing up then, while serious radio fans in Ottawa have no option but the CBC (see the Aug. 2 Newsrooms), we should count ourselves lucky that the Citizen -- and the Sun -- have been afforded what resources they have.
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Internet resource: National Public Radio's site on the World Wide Web, where entire newscasts can be found, is http://www.npr.org. Newrooms e-mail should be addressed to jamesh@achilles.net .-30-