Quarantine Diary 5: Not a good time for newspapers
Today is Day 7 of my personal lockdown in London. I never tire of explaining that this should be Day 8; I feel cheated because although I arrived here in the morning of last Thursday, that first day did not count. Officially, it counted as Day Zero. I don’t know why. At this point, it may look like crying over spilt milk but there is nothing like a good moan, especially in England, where complaining is an art form.
One thing this strict quarantine does to you is distort time, particularly the days of the week. When you spend your time in the same place, time also takes on a quality of sameness, especially when you go through the same activities in the same place. I nearly missed the deadline for submitting my Mirror column to the editors because of the difficulty of distinguishing one day from the other.
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But quarantine has its good points. I have already said a lot about watching Ghanaian content over the past one week. It is an interesting phenomenon that Ghanaians outside tend to know a lot more than those who actually live in the country. Even when I am in Ghana, I sometimes learn of important breaking news from my cousins abroad when they call me to find out whether something is true or not, only for me to let them down by informing them that I was watching cricket with West Indies playing Australia!
Personally, I can confirm that it is true that we are more anxious about what happens in our country when we are outside. When I lived here in the UK before I joined West Africa magazine in the early 1990s, I used to travel some distance to buy newspapers a week old – all the newspapers for the week, especially the Daily Graphic and Ghanaian Times - and read the whole thing at one sitting. Now, even people at home are not reading the newspapers!
My brother’s theory is that since those of us in Ghana live the news and events that make the news, we tend not to feel the urgency to know what is happening. That is true but also true is the impact of technology on communication. For example, although there is no direct live TV available, Ghanaians here have access to array of platforms such as Netflix, YouTube, Prime Video, IPlayer, etc, which all provide content on demand. The cost of watching this lot is generally included in the cost of Wifi. Of course, there are conventional TV stations such as the various BBC, ITV and various others.
It is a pity that newspapers from Ghana don’t appear to be in any kind of demand here. It is not surprising because social media and broadcasting have dwarfed the press as people’s preferred source of information for a long time, but this means that people are losing out on parts of the newspaper that is usually ignored by social media such as adverts, features and even profiles.
Of course, there is a drop in the hard paper version but I think that Graphic Communications Group, the New Times Corporation and Ghana News Agency must find a way to push their digital platforms a little harder. There is a lot in the press that does not interest social media promoters and broadcast show hosts who take the bigger pie of available audiences.
No London or England report is complete without the weather coming in somewhere. As I have explained in earlier entries, the weather has been terrible, which from a selfish point of view is a good thing. It has not made going out attractive. However, the sun suddenly came up towards the end of the day, around 8pm. Who needs the sun at 8pm. Many things are incomprehensible in this land of hope and glory!
Let us enjoy our wall-to-wall sunshine; some people will kill for it, and probably did.
Surely, we shall overcome.
