news&views Autumn 2018 | Page 9

From the Editor Robin Carson | Editor, news&views Some Important Matters There are a few essential matters that I would like to share with you that relate to news&views. The fi rst of these is the most important. After September 1, the email addresses you are used to using to communicate with news&views will no longer work. For the past seven years, I have been maintaining news&views email using accounts that are my own; now, fi nally, news&views email accounts will become part of ARTA’s overall communications. Please understand that this is not some sort of corporate decision, nor is it Robin Carson fi nally rebelling against paying for and maintaining these addresses; rather, because I am moving, we have arranged for ARTA addresses. It’s about time, I think. So, newsandviews@shaw.ca, nveditor@shaw.ca, and nvsubmit@shaw.ca no longer work. Instead, I would invite you to submit your articles, branch news, letters, and opinions to nvsubmit@arta.net And, if you would like to communicate with the editor (still me) directly, please do so at nveditor@arta.net I have easy access to both of these accounts, and I always try to reply promptly (although my good intentions put a pretty good layer of asphalt on the Hadean road!) Second, as I write this, I am not sure about the status of news&views as an online magazine. I know that launching it has not been easy. We’ve always had a pdf version available, and we’ve always known how clunky pdfs are to read on either a reader or a tablet. But we’ve found that it isn’t all that easy to create a page-fl ipping, live-link zine, either. After September 1, the email addresses for news&views will change: Contributions may be sent to nvsubmit@arta.net To contact the editor, write to nveditor@arta.net Our target was to launch with this issue, and we will if we are ready. And don’t worry — the paper version of news&views is not going away. Third, you will notice that we are beginning to publish articles that deal with the end of life. In my seven years as editor, we have only published a single article and a single opinion piece on the subject. It’s not that the topic has been taboo for us, it’s just a topic that is diffi cult to deal with on many levels, and it is only very rarely that an article is made available to us to publish. We have had several articles about wills and the like, but there has been only the one about the end of life itself — an excellent article by Peter Mueller about memorial societies in the Winter 2015 issue. I have no intention of seeing news&views become dark and morbid, but end-of-life issues are matters that seniors must deal with. I have asked the Wellness Committee to assist us with appropriate articles. So, as the French say, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. In other words, news&views continues to evolve, but it remains the same magazine. And therein lies the challenge of editing a magazine like this one: to encourage healthy change in content and form while maintaining a familiar and comfortable identity. ● news&views AUTUMN 2018 | 9