I stopped my subscription to the Globe and Mail the other day, and this is the first day without it. I was finding increasingly fewer articles worth reading. The Toronto-centric news just doesn't seem relevant out here on the wet coast and the increasing number of stories about reality television, celebrities and movie tie-ins were crowding out more serious pieces.
I went to the Globe website this morning to see what I missed - not much apparently - Paul Martin and Jean Chretien are still feuding, Nova Scotia is having an election, Canada's UN rating has dropped (though Canadians still are infinitely better off than people in most of the world.
It's curious, our fascination with news. Human beings absolutely have to know what's going on in the world - in our neighbourhoods, in our cities, our country and elsewhere in the world. News about wars, news about elections, about celebrities, about sports. Scandals, gossip, quirky tales of human nature, anthropocentric stories about cute animals; we lap it all up. Perhaps it's evolutionary; a combination of being social animals that live in groups and needing information about food sources, predators, etc.
I get my information about food sources, predators and the pecking order from the community papers (especially the Georgia Straight and the Westender - I find the Courier [a creature of CanWest Global] doesn't have much to say) and from the net (my chief sources are listed in the sidebar).