I love the many recent changes you are making to the Advocate. I have read the paper daily for almost 20 years, and in my mind it just keeps getting better and better.
I love that you now lead with local content. There is so much in our community that we wouldn’t be aware of if it weren’t for your coverage. Your recent columns on Julietta’s Place and the homeless invasion of Heritage Village last summer are but two of many excellent examples.
I love the many splashes of colour on almost every page — even the ads are eye catching! I enjoy the opinions of your many local columnists. One of the new ones — Chris Sal0mons — has become a favourite.
In fact, I would say that the Red Deer Advocate is perfect — except for one glaring deficiency. Why have you banished the Advocate View Entertainment Magazine, otherwise known as the weekly TV schedule? Those daily columns that you now print about TV from 7 to 11:30 p.m. that day do not even come close to satisfying the needs that the weekly editions provided. They do not allow one to plan in advance for watching one’s weekly program favourites.
Some really miss the weekday daytime schedule. What I miss the most is the Movie Week columns where the movies for the week are listed together with the ratings for each movie and a brief synopsis. I used to record all of the four-star movies. More often that not, these movies were being shown in the middle of the night, well after 11:30 time that your coverage now ends, so now I have no way of finding out when any of those late night movies are being shown.
I have tried to find alternate sources for the information that your weekly TV schedules provided, but both the Internet and the commercially printed mags have let me down. The information there is not easy to find and one must scroll through a lot of extraneous information to get to what you want.
There are very few things in life that are indispensable — but the weekly TV schedule you provided until very recently is one such rarity. It is invaluable and not easily replaced. Please return it to us, post-haste.
Donna Stinson
Red Deer
Editor’s note: We do regret that we have had to change the way we deliver TV listings, and we are aware the daily grids and highlights package we offer is not everything Advocate View once was. However, publishing the View was extremely expensive and we could no longer justify that expense. Publishing the daily grids allows us to continue to provide basic information and to minimize the cost. We have added some material to the package this week and will continue to look for ways to improve the listings as we move forward.