From the middle of August until mid-September has been called 'the silly season'. Nobody quite knows why. The word 'silly' did not originally mean "foolish'; it meant 'carefree', something like the Scottish 'sauncy' (French 'sans souci'). 'Silly season' may have been coined in a 19th Century newspaper office. While Parliament was in recess, the courts were not sitting and people who otherwise make news were out of town and out of reach, the papers were reduced to publishing the inconsequential.

Country folk were busy with the early harvest and the fall fairs with their events and out-of-town visitors had not yet begun.

The business of getting news involves getting to people. If they were all either on holiday or busy in the fields, journalists had little of interest to report. Columnists, of course, always have something to blather (more correctly, blether) about.

'Fiddleville' being past and our fairs still to come, one expects local news may be scarce for awhile. Don't be surprised if, when you disentangle one of your local papers from its elasticbound cocoon of tangled flyers, it may be difficult to find much else. The clutter of a dozen or more loose advertisements in a newspaper is annoying to this reader, as are graffiti on walls and the junk mail delivered by Canada Post.

A slow news week brings an old New Yorker magazine cartoon to mind. It concerned The New York Times in its heyday when it was famous for the multiple sections of its Sunday edition being even weightier than its editorial opinions. In the cartoon a woman is sitting lap deep in newsprint, her legs lost in the paper lying discarded around them. Her husband, coffee in hand, asks, "Is there anything in The Times today?". Anything of interest in all those pages?

Another cartoon showed two newspapers with large respective headlines of MURDER and HUGE EXPLOSION. A dignified matron, parasol in hand, looks at them and says to the vendor, "I think I'll take the murder today".

The Toronto Star made a recent effort to increase its circulation in this county. Apart from the fact that its local 'home delivery' amounts to a paper being tossed from a slowly moving vehicle onto a sidewalk, who needs a daily record of the mortal shots exchanged by gangs of immigrant youths in Metro? Didn't many of us leave the city to get away from all that?

In the silly season, or at any other time, I cannot imagine being without a good newspaper. I do have an aversion to tabloids, perhaps because of their association with a kind of journalism I find unsatisfying. Take The Sun, for example. In my estimation it creates a year-round silly season. Its reportage and opinion pieces do no credit to

its readers' I.Q. The good news is that its readership is declining. That may indicate a better educated, more discriminating reading public.

This space would be happy if the traditional broadsheet, such as you are now reading, were reduced to 'Berliner' size. It is a 'midi' format about one-third taller and one column wider than a tabloid.

In the U.K. The Guardian (daily) and The Observer (weekly) now publish in that format. So does Le Monde in Paris. Only two papers in North America have thus far followed suit, neither of them in Canada.

Page size, of course, does not in itself make a newspaper more readable but, whatever the current problems of publishers, I can't envisage a society of informed adults without the print media. Who with normal eyesight would abandon the satisfaction of holding and reading a book for words recorded on a disc?

Similarly, there is no substitute for the pleasure of a newspaper hand-held or spread before one on a table top. That will be unchanged a century hence in 2109. Just wait and see.

Most of us have experienced the eye strain involved in sitting in front of a computer screen too many hours a day. Who, then, will ever wish in off hours to read extensive news coverage or opinion pieces on-line? If so, they would be wise to see their optometrist as often as their dental hygienist.

There will be fewer newspapers as communities grow and the world contracts. Already newspaper and magazine journalism are melding but the print media will keep pace with developments in film and on-line. I like the name of the new magazine-sized Toronto afternoon give-away for commuters that is coming in September. It will be called 't.o.night'. Great title! But it will need more than a re-hash of the morning's news.

Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook, the Canadian-born Fleet Street press baron, once said in Britain that a successful paper needed both a distinctive point of view (he called it a 'prejudice') and a broad outlook. In other words, it should entice or jar the reader out of narrow provincialism or unconcern. Every Canadian English language paper should have a French language editorial, perhaps reprinted from Le Devoir or Le Monde.

Mandarin Chinese, Arabic or Hindi may still be spoken by many Canadians but they are not native to this land. They will die out but French and English will remain. We may be multicultural but we must not be multilingual. That, like allowing dual citizenship, is divisive.

"All the news that's fit to print" is the New York Times mission statement. Better still, the Globe and Mail's motto used to be "Perspective is everything:. Maybe now that my old colleague Reginald Stackhouse's son John is its editor-in-chief The Globe will regain a wider perspective and even, like the National Post, celebrate Christmas with something more than annual front page reproductions of Ken Thomson's Krieghoff winter scenes.

Independent newspapers, like this one not tied to a metropolitan chain, through their editorials, oped columns and letters keep us talking to one another as neighbours. They help emancipate people who live in bedroom communities from the isolation that daily commuting can impose. They deliver us from bondage to the mindset of Metro Toronto from which most of us are glad to be free.