February 5, 2008 Vol. 33 No. 27

Newspapers dead? Not so fast

Last week I attended an in depth seminar at the American Press Institute in Washington, D.C. on the 24/7 newsroom — newspapers becoming more aggressive in developing a presence on the Internet.
The four-day conference was aimed at helping newspapers restructure their editorial and production staff to put more emphasis on an on-line product. Reporting news on-line as it happens – blogs, chat rooms, profile pages, photo galleries, video and so on – the opportunities on-line were mind-numbingly endless.
The seminar included representatives from newspapers from across North America and I admit for many of us in attendance the omnipotence of the Internet and its potential impact on the journalism industry was overwhelming.
However, at the conference we attended a presentation at USA Today led by editor Ken Paulson. USA Today has recently integrated its on-line and print products into one newsroom paving the way for a news portfolio rather than a newspaper. Paulson predicted there will always be a printed newspaper, but added many daily newspapers will stop publishing print products on certain days of the week. For example, the Houston Chronicle may not provide a printed product seven days a week and may only be available on-line on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
This certainly had the room of traditional print journalists abuzz.
But Paulson also made another bold prediction.
He said while newspapers (or news products or information centers as some call them now) need to focus on having a presence on the world wide web, all is not lost.
While the Internet is certainly grabbing everyone’s attention, he explained that there is another state-of-the-art product available that is competing with the new media wave.
The benefits of this product are incredible. For example: It is portable and can be taken anywhere; there are no pop-up ads; there are no viruses; information is provided quickly (no waiting for downloads); it is light-weight; it is colourful and full of photos and graphics; readers don’t have to search for local information as it has already been collected and presented in this product; information is hyper-local; it is available almost everywhere — even delivered to your door; it is recyclable; and it is cheap and easily accessible.
It is a newspaper and it was a heck of a sales pitch.

Editorial -

Election promises are too late

Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach has been playing Santa Claus this month as he throws around election gifts like he is Jolly Old Saint Nick.
However, Christmas was more than a month ago and Stelmach’s election promises may be a bit late.
On Monday Stelmach’s Conservative government called a provincial election for March 3 and it is no surprise on the day he calls an election it is announced in the Throne speech the Tories will phase out health care premiums over the next four years. Again, no coincidence that is the length of his next term should he get re-elected. It will be perfect platform fodder for his re-election campaign in 2012: “We are the government that has now eliminated health care premiums!”
A Liberal victory in March would be a shocker that would match the New York Giants Super Bowl win, but the Grits may make some surprising headway as a result of Stelmach’s slow reaction to his previous election promises.
After making bold promises during his run for the Tory leadership in November 2006, Stelmach dropped the ball on affordable housing, health care and the climate change policy announced last week has been a disaster.
Regardless, his legacy may be the new royalty regime he unveiled last fall. The royalty review was absolutely a necessity, but it has been vehemently attacked by the oil and gas industry, economists and environmentalists alike. Sometimes if everyone hates a new policy that means it was a good decision, but that just does not seem to be the case this time around.
Calling a quick election may catch Stelmach’s opponents offguard as the New Democrats, Liberals, Greens and the new Wild Rose party scramble to get candidates in place.
However, the Tories’ ironclad grip on Alberta’s provincial politics will be tested in March. Stelmach has only been in office for one year and he likely deserves a shot to reveal his long-term vision, but Albertans will send a message this spring that they are not pleased with the direction this government is taking in an extremely prosperous province.
In March Albertans’ message will be clear: Mr. Stelmach and the Conservative government, you are on notice.

Letters to the Editor -

Another sad day in beautiful Alberta

Dear Editor,
What a disheartening spectacle. Here we see Premier Ed Stelmach scuttling back down from the Land of Suncor waving a little piece of paper and making noises about having reined in the Great Bear of the North (aka the Oilsands). 
Now with a minor tweak of the oilsands royalty regimen, bringing the rate up slightly from somewhere around criminal to merely ludicrous, the oil industry is assured a zillion or so extra acres of boreal forest to despoil and render toxic for the next thousand years, while they stuff their pockets with unspeakable volumes of our cash, stolen and lost forever. And for this we are meant to be thankful.  Oh dear. Why am I reminded of the grim spectre of  British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returning from Berlin in 1939, similarly waving a little piece of paper, assuring the world that he had appeased the Beast?
Old men who fought the totalitarian impulses of the last century must surely be wondering what has become of popular representation in a land where corporate interests so blithely brush aside the concern and condemnation of the citizenry. A majority of Albertans, and Canadians, has called for a slowdown and moratorium on further operational developments in oilsands activity until the full, long-term cost-benefit analysis has been thoroughly assessed and articulated  —  social, environmental and economic.  The rest of the world looks at us with ongoing shock and dismay as we trip over ourselves to rip up our northland, poison our waters and hugely exacerbate an already critical and burgeoning crisis of climate change.
Mr. Stelmach is crowing when he ought to be hanging his head in shame. The price we will pay for this capitulation will be counted out in compounded misery for generations down the line.  Another sad day in our beautiful province.
Phil Burpee
Pincher Creek

Dunbow Road needs some attention

Dear Editor,
Whereas Dunbow Road east of the Deerfoot Trail has been upgraded in the last five years, the shorter and much busier stretch west to Highway 2A past The Lake at Heritage Pointe has not been. As a commuter and a biker, the safety differences in the two road sections are significant.
Whatever rationale is presented by the authorities or developers for this discrepancy — the completed upgrading of the east end appears to rule out governmental budgetary considerations — a serious accident would rightfully bring into question the design inadequacy of the road for the present traffic volume and patterns and could result in serious professional and public liabilities for those responsible.
Wim M. Veldman
DeWinton

Provincial election call, Monday, March 3 After numerous announcements of new schools and lots of other spending including the elimination of health care premiums over the next four years no one was surprised to hear that the Conservatives, under the direction of Premier Ed Stelmach, have called a provincial election for Monday, March 3. In the last provincial election the Conservatives had 62 seats, Liberals 16, NDP four and Alliance one. Out of the 83 seats about half are rural and that has been the stronghold of the Conservatives over the past 30-plus years. Will it continue? I guess that is up to you and me. You may remember I predicted a provincial election this year, but I will leave the outcome up to the voters. My only hope is that the electorate will get out and vote. No use whining about the results if you are not a part of it. I wish we would go to a system where we went to the polls every four years on a certain date and took away the political hammer of the government to make the decision of when we go. Keep an eye on the news over the next four weeks and mark your calendar so you will go to the polls to make an informed decision. • • • • • I see that yesterday our MP Ted Menzies announced some recent funding for Okotoks under the New Horizons for Seniors Programs. I’m not sure of the amount but assume it to be about $25,000. Congratulations to our Senior’s Club as they are a fast-growing organization with plenty of activities on their plate. We are fortunate to have so many volunteers keeping the activities ongoing. • • • • • Wow, my friends up north have enjoyed reminding me that the Oilers minus their top scorer smoked the Flames 5-0 on Tuesday night. The Flames are a funny team this year as they really run hot and cold. I just keep the faith and expect at the end of the season they will be at the top of their game for a playoff run. GO FLAMES.... * * * * * * Two months from now the Town of Okotoks will be moving into their new digs on main street. I know they spent alot of money on the old Scotiabank building but it was important in many ways that they remained downtown. Next on the agenda should be the renaming of Elizabeth east, Elizabeth west, McRae street and North Railway to one name for the entire west-east stretch through the downtown. My choices are Main Street or Elizabeth Street.

US climate policy after Bush

Last month in Bali, as the talks on a new climate change treaty to replace the Kyoto accord reached a crisis point, the United States was actually booed by the delegates of more than 180 other countries at the conference. The Bush administration’s dogged refusal to accept any hard targets for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions had simply exhausted everybody else’s patience. But in less than a year there will be a new president, and then the US roadblock will be removed. Won’t it?
Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards, the three serious contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination, are all pledged to cut U.S. emissions by 80 per cent from 1990 levels by the year 2050, and all three accept that this can only be achieved by legal caps on emissions.
The leading Republican candidate, John McCain, makes the same promises, except that he is only aiming for 65 per cent cuts by 2050.
Now, you can argue that a presidential candidate who promises to deliver something in 2050 is not taking any risks, because the victor in this contest will be gone from the White House again by 2017 at the latest.
Tell us what you’re going to do by 2015, and we’ll take you a lot more seriously. But it still marks a real and hopeful change in the world if the next U.S. president accepts the need for both specific targets and emission caps.
As for the other Republican candidates, Mike Huckabee also supports emission caps, though he has not proposed any specific target for cuts.
Mitt Romney has made no commitments at all, and pulled Massachusetts out of a regional deal to cut carbon dioxide emissions from power plants when he was governor. Rudy Giuliani isn’t even sure that there is any connection between human activities and global warming.
But the likelihood of any Republican candidate winning the 2008 presidential election, in the midst of what is shaping up to be a quite nasty recession, is small. Even now, McCain is the only one who consistently holds his own in the polls when he is matched against any of the three Democratic contenders. So we can probably assume that the next U.S. president will be serious about climate change, but that does not automatically remove the roadblock.
None of the candidates have agreed to sign up to any climate change treaty that does not require the rapidly developing countries, above all China and India, to accept specific obligations too. George W. Bush used the exemptions for those countries in the Kyoto accord as an excuse for rejecting the whole process, but the demand that they make their own commitments to control emissions is strong and bipartisan in the United States.
In 1997 the U.S. Senate passed the Byrd-Hagel Resolution, which declared that the United States should not sign any climate change treaty that does not also include binding targets and timetables for developing nations, by a 95-0 vote. When then-vice president Al Gore signed the Kyoto accord in 1998, he acknowledged that it would not be acted upon in the Senate until the developing nations also accepted targets and timetables — and nothing has really changed since then.
Why is this an American bottom line? Because the United States is the world’s greatest power, and almost every senior official and politician in Washington believes that it should stay that way forever.
It will not, of course. The rapid economic growth of the two Asian giants practically guarantees that the United States will be just one of the three great powers by mid-century, for economic strength is the source of most other forms of power. But it still makes a difference whether that happens in 2025 or 2045, especially to Americans.
Nobody in Washington is prepared to give the emerging great powers a free pass on emissions, because they are afraid that it would help them to catch up with the United States. Any climate change treaty that the U.S. signs, even under an administration that takes the problem with the utmost seriousness, will have to respect that concern.
The U.S. position is not actually so distant from that of the other developed countries. Being less concerned to safeguard their relative positions in the pecking order, the Europeans, the Canadians and the Japanese were willing to let the developing countries have a 15-year free ride under the Kyoto accord. After all, the excess greenhouse gases in the atmosphere now were almost all emitted by the old industrialized countries — and back in 1997, they didn’t realize how urgent it was to make deep cuts in emissions.
But they always intended that the developing countries should accept a share of responsibility for future emissions under the follow-up treaty to Kyoto, which is the one now being negotiated. Not an equal share, of course, because they are still relatively poor and their per capita emissions are vastly less than those of the developed countries, but they cannot just let their emissions rip.
The post-Bush United States is not going to be a push-over on emission targets for developing countries, and it will have all the other industrial countries as its allies. There is just no point in France or Canada cutting their emissions if China’s and India’s are growing at 10 per cent a year.

Letters to the Editor -

Dyer column sheds light on Kenya

Dear Editor,
I just received an email from my dad, Rodney James, who is in Mexico and he suggested I read the Gwynne Dyer column.
I have just returned from a year in Kenya and was very impressed with your editorial. Thankfully, I arrived home prior to the election but everyone knew this was coming if Kibaki won. Everyone was fearful that corruption would mar this election. I worry that this is no longer a story on the major news as I think the country needs pressure from the rest of the world. It is a great country full of wonderful people and I hate to think of Kenya repeating the Rwanda crisis.
Thanks for the editorial.
Lorna Richmond
Ponoka