The Journal de Montréal is going to end its Sunday paper edition – which seems an odd choice, since isn’t it usually Sundays that people read the paper over a leisurely breakfast or brunch?
Updates from December, 2022 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
A 16-year-old boy was shot with an air gun Thursday afternoon in Anjou. Both these reports mention it happened near a school, but that the school itself was not involved in the incident.
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Kate
It’s not the first time this has been presaged, but fifteen community organizations in Park Extension are going to lose the spaces they’ve had for years as the CSSDM prepares to empty the William Hingston building for repairs and renovations that may take years. These organizations look after the many new arrivals that often land in Park Ex because – at least till recently – it has been an affordable neighbourhood.
The borough mayor is promising to find some kind of space for the organizations, but not in the short term.
We have not learned to think ahead about this kind of thing at all.
Shoe dropping later: I wonder how this story might intersect with the city’s plans to give away some older buildings. I suppose it’s unlikely that any of them are in or near Park Extension.
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Kate
A woman pedestrian hit by a car in Park Ex on Wednesday has died.
Four women pedestrians have died on Montreal streets over the last month. Three of them were in their 80s.
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Kate
I’m not too sure how credible a scientific source this is, but a group called ARUP says Montreal is the world’s fourth most “sponge-like” city, behind Mumbai, New York, and Singapore, for its natural ability to absorb rainfall.
DeWolf
Arup is one of the world’s leading engineering and design firms, and in addition to planning cities and building things like giant bridges, they do a lot of research. So I’d say it’s a pretty credible source.
CE
Seems a being an island makes a city “sponge-like.”
DeWolf
@CE Worth noting that the number 2 city in the list is Nairobi, which is completely landlocked, with a trickle of a river running through it. It has a lot of parkland within the urban area, including a national park, but it did experience some pretty bad flooding last year so I wonder…
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Kate
It’s all over our media Thursday that Céline Dion has revealed a serious health issue, stiff person syndrome, a rare neurological condition leading to muscle spasms and deformity. Wikipedia says it’s rare, there’s no known cause and no cure.
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Kate
Éric Duhaime has been excluded from the National Assembly given that his Quebec Conservatives won zero seats. He wanted an office and the right to hold press conferences in the building. And to be taken seriously.
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Kate
Emergency room crowding in Montreal is not going away as waves of respiratory diseases crash together. Historically, there have usually been rushes on the ERs during and just after the holiday season, so we have that to look forward to as well.
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Kate
Greenpeace has hung a large banner on the Ring downtown.
JaneyB
Beautiful and compelling!
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Kate
A cyclist and a pedestrian are in critical condition after separate incidents Wednesday, one in Park Ex, the other in Montreal East.
Laval has also seen a couple of pedestrian incidents this week, reportedly both fatal.
Meezly
I wonder if there is a spike in these type of accidents due to the shorter winter days s these recent collisions occurred after 4pm, when it’s getting dark.
Compounding that, it’s been raining which greatly hampers visibility. There are way fewer cyclists now, so drivers are already getting used to not paying attention. I’ve been biking again after the first snow had melted. A couple nights ago, I had to go out in the rain, and I didn’t care that wearing a neon traffic vest was uncool, nor blasting my front and back bike lights.
Being visible is better than being a road accident statistic!
Joey
Meezly may be on to something. Also: city lighting has gotten a lot worse in the last few years. The newer streetlights tend to be brighter and to concentrate their light more, so the contrast with relatively unlit areas is stronger (the older more orangey lights seemed to diffuse light better, but it’s also conceivable my memory is tainted). Additionally, more and more car headlights are considerably brighter than in the past – creating similar contrast problems.
Also, of course, there are more cars and everyone is impatient.
Tim S.
I’m a little stunned by how badly people are driving (and walking and biking) in such terrible visibility this week. Walking home at 5PM last night was pretty iffy. And I don’t understand why various safety bodies haven’t realized yet that super-bright blinding headlights make things more dangerous for everybody.
Also, I hope there’s a special place in hell for people who drive backwards down streets full of kids because they can’t be bothered waiting behind a stopped school bus.
Stay safe everyone!
Simon
Motorists are simply especially murderous in the weeks before christmas, this happens every year. It’s just as dark in early January and it’s not like this.
Tim S.
Snow does help make things brighter, which might explain why things get better in January.
Spi
I think a lot of pedestrians are completely oblivious as to how difficult they are to see/limited visibility in a car can be.
To start with there’s a windshield, in an ideal world where all cars are meticulously maintained and just out of the car wash, the visibility through the windshield is as good as with the naked eye. In the real world cars are always dirty have some dirt or dust on their windshield, even if they are clear of debris, which dulls what you see.
With the proliferation of SUV’s it’s near impossible to see a pedestrian if they are behind one.
Just because you can see a cars headlights, doesn’t mean you’re being illuminated. They are angled and projected towards the road at a specific angle.
Many streets only have one side of the street (thus one sidewalk) illuminated, usually the side the lamp post is installed on.
Just this week I was walking behind these women that were dressed in all black on a stretch of street that wasn’t particularly well illuminated, I was maybe 20-30 meters behind them and if they it weren’t for the soles of their shoes being white I’m not sure I’d have known they were there.
As it gets darker it’s genuinely harder to see and distinguish people, it’s not a conspiracy by drivers to mow down little old ladies and cyclist.
CE
I rented a car last weekend and was driving it a lot after sunset. I couldn’t believe the degree to which these super bright white lights made driving difficult. If one was coming at me, I sometimes felt momentarily blinded until it passed. If a car is following, sometimes if they’re at just the right height, all the mirrors are flooded with bright white light and there’s nothing you can do about it. I actually had to slow down to force a car to pass me because its lights were so distracting.
Kate
CE, I believe it. I went over to the Claude Robillard centre a couple of weeks ago to donate blood. By the time I left to come home it was totally dark, and walking along Christophe‑Colomb was not fun at all with the blinding headlights from oncoming vehicles. And then I had to get across Crémazie under the highway, half blinded at every turn. Isn’t there a legal limit to the lumen output of headlights?
Ian
Another big problem with thise super bright headlights is that it’s hard to see their turn signals when you are facing them. I agree that they are a genuine public hazard for everyone.
Tim S.
Vehicle design is a federal responsibility, and after a little digging I wrote to this email at Transport Canada: mvs-sa@tc.gc.ca. I’ll see if anyone gets back to me with anything useful.
Tim S.
Wow, somebody wrote back to me at 7AM: summary: new technology is brighter, but shouldn’t be a problem, new vehicles are federal responsibility but use and maintenance are provincial, my concerns will be shared.
For what it’s worth, I suspect the problem is on new vehicles, so the feds have a role here, and whatever testing they do isn’t accurate for real world conditions. But if anyone else is concerned, write.
Kate
Good work, Tim S.!
Kevin 23:50 on 2022-12-08 Permalink
Catholaïcité!
Daisy 09:22 on 2022-12-09 Permalink
Le Devoir doesn’t have a Sunday edition either.
Ephraim 10:35 on 2022-12-09 Permalink
There never was a Sunday paper growing up. The big paper was always Saturday, large enough for 2 days of reading. But I guess I have another question… people still get the paper edition? I haven’t held a newspaper in my hands in at least a decade or more
Josh 11:16 on 2022-12-09 Permalink
I always wondered how it developed that the big US broadsheets put out their big editions of the week on Sundays, while in Canada the big newspaper day was Saturday. Maybe the idea was that most of the stuff in the Saturday edition (sections like Auto, Home, Travel or the big Op-Ed takeout most shops ran) had longer shelf lives and people could put them off until Sunday if they chose?
But yeah, the NYT, Boston Globe, LA Times etc all put out their biggest editions on Sundays while (when they all had paper editions), the Gazette, La Presse, the Toronto Star, the Globe etc. all went big on Saturdays. Never understood how that came to be.
Daniel 12:41 on 2022-12-09 Permalink
Josh, I’ve wondered the same thing. I know that in Spain and Argentina for example the big day with the magazine and special sections is/was Sunday. I believe it’s the same in the UK. The answer is ad money, of course. I’m not sure how, but it’s all going to go back to that.
I’m not as cynical as some when it comes to the news operation bending to the will of advertisers, but certainly when it comes to something as elemental and operational as when to put out the big edition, it was going to be all about ads.
U.S. newspapers did try to have it both ways by selling a “Sunday” edition on Saturday. (All the preprint special sections and coupons with a little fresh news that was then swapped out for the *actual* Sunday edition. So little happened or made the news on Saturdays that this wasn’t a huge job.) It was called the bulldog edition, supposedly because it was “aggressively” out ahead.
If you subscribed at home, you got a thin Saturday paper delivered. But if you were at the shop and picked up a single copy, you were far more likely to grab the bulldog. The Saturday paper just looked sad next to it. This helped the Sunday paper to boost its circulation numbers, since it was essentially on sale for two days. (And, yes, bigger circulation numbers = more ad money.)
I worked on this stuff for quite a while but typing it out now all seems so quaint in the age of instant news!
Kate 13:05 on 2022-12-09 Permalink
As Ephraim says, time was there was no paper here on Sundays. Doing research for the history stuff on my blog calendar, I got used to seeing zero Sunday editions from the Gazette and La Presse archives. I think it was a combination of the dominance of the Catholic church in Quebec and the influence of the “blue laws” in other parts of Canada that held off the Sunday editions until the 1980s.
DeWolf 13:11 on 2022-12-09 Permalink
@Ephraim, I get the paper version of Le Devoir every Saturday because it was offered for $2 extra per month when I got a digital subscription. It seemed like a good deal. And just like reading a real book, there’s something pleasurable in taking time to read an actual newspaper on the weekend. I spent enough time staring at screens as it is…
Ephraim 13:46 on 2022-12-09 Permalink
@DeWolf – And then getting the black oily ink marks off of everything 🙂
mare 14:20 on 2022-12-09 Permalink
I miss real printed newspapers. I used to read the whole paper, front to back, every day (except Sunday because Dutch newspapers only publish 6 days per week) even articles in the business and sport section sometimes. Now I probably read more newspaper articles, but from many different newspapers. I rarely go to the front page of the 3 newspapers I subscribe to, but get there via links on Twitter/Mastodon, in their daily emails, or from here and some other websites. So I read much more selectively, and more content I agree with.
CE 14:51 on 2022-12-09 Permalink
Years ago, I boarded in the house of an old man whose kids had long ago moved out so he had extra rooms that he let out to students at an incredibly low price. It was a very neighbourly house and we received the provincial and city newspaper every day. A neighbour came over every morning with the Globe and Mail and we’d all sit around reading the papers. Other people would drop in throughout the morning and read them too. By the end of the day, they were all marked up and coffee stained and cut up. If my landlord would go away, I’d put them all together for him and he’d read through all of them when he got back to get caught up on what happened.
I too miss the papers but I find that the print versions are now of such low quality that it’s not worth subscribing anymore.