The Gregorian calendar, introduced in 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII, is what most of the world conventionally uses today. It consists of 365 days in a “standard year” and 366 days in a leap year. 

There are other calendars like the Islamic calendar, the Chinese calendar, the Julian calendar, the Coptic calendar, the Ethiopian calendar, etc with differing number of days. Nonetheless, all the calendars base their counting on the moon with either 12 or 13 months.  

The number of days we majorly use today were first “introduced to the world” by the ancient Egyptians who “invented a schematised civil year of 365 days divided into three seasons, each of which consisted of four months of 30 days each. To complete the year, five intercalary days were added at its end, so that the 12 months were equal to 360 days plus five extra days.” 

So what does the calendar or number of moons have to do with journalism that this column digresses to? It is because a week or so ago, September 28th to be precise, was World News Day! It passed quietly in our part of the world, even among those of us who earn a living from the business of news! 

World News Day is usually organised by the World Editors Forum (WEF) and the Canadian Journalism Foundation (CJF) “to unite news organisations across the world to drive home the message that credible journalism matters.”

This year brought together at least 300 media organisations across platforms and genres to put a spotlight on the theme “Climate Change” by doing cross-cutting stories on the environment that were simultaneously published or aired in different countries.

You likely did not encounter any such stories in Uganda. But you likely were adversely affected by the environment that week either through debilitating heat, floods, etc but these were reported as unconnected events.

A note on the WND page has this very important explanation about why the media must pull together on issues of climate change. It says:

“World News Day is an opportunity to step back from the news cycle and promote the impact of your journalism – seen through the eyes of your audience and those who have been affected by it. It is a moment to deepen the understanding of journalism’s role in addressing the climate emergency. Covid-19 taught us that we are all connected and it has shown how focused journalism can make a difference. We face a common threat in the degradation of our planet and it is a universal theme we can use to demonstrate why #JournalismMatters.”

This is therefore a great industry initiative that seeks to take away the narrative of bad news, disasters, etc and also explore solutions as well as highlight the wins. And, as Meera Salva says, the best climate coverage is local! 

“The climate change reporting people see in much of the world is a combination of summitry and extreme events that feels remote to their lives. Journalists need better local data, access to experts and funding to cover the climate change stories on the ground in their own countries,” she says. 

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HAVE YOUR SAY
A concerned reader: Daily Monitor’s online version seems to have a problem. The problem is that the image in the first article in the first column overlaps with the list of articles in the second column. The overlap makes it difficult to read the titles of the news articles. It is annoying! It should be easy to fix it by reducing the width of the image so that it does not bleed into the next column. Is there a reason why this has not been fixed? I cannot see any value in not fixing the problem. If anything, it is an annoyance to the readers. Please make it easier and enjoyable for us reading your paper.

Public-Editor: I put this issue to the online technical team and this was their explanation: “I believe the reader might be seeing overlapped articles due to perhaps network issues. Sometimes articles appear to be overlapping if one’s internet is not as stable or strong, causing the website, which is fairly heavy to take a while to appear in its entirety. It will helped if the reader can share a screenshot of what appears on their gadget so we would be able to tell and advise.”

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