Dispatch from The Front Line: Rumours of our demise have been very slightly exaggerated
We're on holiday, folks, and we hope you are too.
Hello, Line readers. We are just checking in with you briefly today to confirm that, despite rumours to the contrary, we are not dead. Dead inside, possibly — that's an occupational hazard in our line of work. But we are as alive as ever.
We are on holiday. As we'd told you during June, we planned on taking early July off. It's mid-July now, and we'll be returning to work at The Line sometime in the coming days (we honestly need to get caught up on our email first, and see what we've been sent!). Our plan for the summer is to maintain a lighter publication schedule. This is for a few reasons: first, most of our contributors are themselves taking time off, and our submissions will drop off until real life resumes after Labour Day.
Second, we suspect that a lot of you also want to unplug a bit from .... all of this ... for the summer. Between us, your Line editors have decades of experience in the daily news biz, and it's true across the board: the public tunes out, bigly, in the summer. Online readership tanks. Subscriptions are put on hold. Radio and TV news ratings collapse. Your traditional outlets don't want to ever really admit that, since they want to keep selling advertisements as if everyone is still totally tuned in and engaged, but it's true. We don't have to worry about that. So we're not going to spam your inboxes just to look busy. Frankly, you've all earned the break, we think, after a weird year and a half.
The third reason is that we're tired, too. The Line is a side gig for us all here. One day that will hopefully change. We really hope so. But it hasn't yet, and we have barbecues to attend in this all-too-brief period before the entire country freezes again.
But rest assured that we are not entirely idle. We will continue to respond to news developments, as we did a few days ago with Philippe Lagassé’s reaction to the announcement of our next governor-general. We will, from time to time, be moved to write, and we'll share that with you here. Some of our contributors will write, too.
That's the thing about writers, after all. We need our breaks, but after a few days of not yelling at ya'll about what we think about everything, we start getting twitchy. Writing isn't a hobby for us, it's an addiction. We'll start jonesing again soon enough.
In the meantime, we are attending to some really boring behind-the-scenes stuff that needed our attention, and sketching out some plans for what will come next for us here. We think you'll enjoy it.
There's one wildcard, though. We are reluctant to even bring it up, but, ahem, we might have a federal election soon. *dies inside.* We'd like to just have a nice national chillout until after Labour Day. But your Line editors can read polls, and the polls look awfully good for the Liberals. There's risk to calling an election now, and we're not totally convinced Trudeau will take it. But we aren't totally convinced he won't! If he calls an early election sometime this summer — please, God, don't let that happen — then we'll be back to a normal publication schedule, well, immediately. And we'll throw a few new things at you, too.
But, again, we hope that doesn't happen, for us, for you, for our spouses and children, for the country at large.
So, yeah, that's it. We hope your summer is going great so far. Ours mostly are. We hope we get to enjoy them another six weeks or so! If all goes well, in that time, we'll continue to put out one or two articles a week, on stuff that we think actually has either real news value, or simply makes a more interesting, thoughtful summer read. And if, if, the PM pulls the plug on his minority government, we'll sigh heavily, splash some cold water on our faces and get back to work here.
Thanks for your continued support, everyone. Building this place with you over the last year has been a lot of fun. And it’ll be even more fun once we have an election to run with … hopefully in the fall. At the earliest!
The Line is Canada’s last, best hope for irreverent commentary. We reject bullshit. We love lively writing. Please consider supporting us by subscribing. Follow us on Twitter @the_lineca. Fight with us on Facebook. Pitch us something: lineeditor@protonmail.com