Thursday 12 March 2015

The shrinking chess column

It is a sad fact of life that most modern newspapers do not carry chess columns (at least in Australia). Those that do either syndicate their columns from another source, or squeeze it into the section left over after Sudoku's and Easy Crosswords are laid out.
One notable exception (up until now) has been the Canberra Times Chess Column, written by GM Ian Rogers. This, and the Bridge column, have been allocated a reasonable amount of space, which allowed both coverage of international events, as well as local news and tournament results. Unfortunately the paper has decided to change the layout of these columns, and has reduced them both in size and importance.
I fear that this is of course a precursor to eliminating the columns altogether. The long running Sydney Morning Herald chess column did not survive the death of Peter Parr, and the trend is to dispense with such 'niche' features altogether. In the case of the SMH, their stated reason was that not enough people complained about the columns absence, and so there was no need to keep it.
Hopefully this will not happen here in Canberra. If you are a regular reader of the column, you can register your concerns to the Canberra Times through their feedback page. If you do give them feedback, please make it relevant and respectful

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Ah well, at least we have blogs like this one to fill the void. Corollary: maybe blogs like this one contribute to the death of the newspaper column... :)
AO