Well, You See, There Used to Be This Thing Called a Newspaper, and People Used to Get It Every Day

by on August 6, 2008 4

I went into the city tonight, bought the Times. I must admit this doesn't happen every day. And there on the front page were two photographs of K2 and a pretty good story about the deaths on the mountain, then front-page pieces about Obama's big donors and the decline of soul food in Harlem, and exposes of Iraq's government surplus from oil sales and of a do-gooder doctor who is accused of sex crimes. The lead on the do-gooder doctor went on way too long. But wow, what a newspaper. I know it's going the way of the typewriter and the buggy, and that journalism is becoming better– more diverse, more detailed, more voluminous, less elitist. But also as fragmented as the shards of light in the kabbalist's godhead. And I venture the Times in electronic form will still be Baedeker for the Establishment, but I know we're going to lose this sort of routine depth. Uh oh, I'm blathering. Better get to sleep now.

About Philip Weiss

Philip Weiss is Founder and Co-Editor of Mondoweiss.net.
Posted in Beyondoweiss

{ 4 comments... read them below or add one }

  1. Richard Witty says:
    August 7, 2008 at 8:30 am

    Libraries.

  2. Jim Haygood says:
    August 7, 2008 at 8:33 am

    .

    "There Used to Be This Thing Called a Newspaper, and People Used to Get It Every Day"

    Sort of like the milkman and the iceman delivering goods to the porch? Wow, life was really different in our great-grandparents' day.

    Surveys show that newspaper readership is nearly nonexistent in the under-30 generation. Every one of them has a cell phone or Blackberry. But I haven't seen a young adult carrying a paper in years. With omnipresent wireless connectivity, delivery of news in paper form will dwindle to a trickle.

    But will the paper-format brand names of the past translate to electronic delivery? The demographic implications are grim. A growing horde would rather listen to MP3s on the way to work, even if they could read news pages on their electronic devices.

    I used to spend a couple of thousand a year on print subscriptions, and write it off as a biz expense. But after all the establishment media acted as stenographers for Bush's Iraq war in March 2003, I pulled the plug on every one of them. They lost me forever there; I don't spend a dime on subscriptions to anything.

    Die, Big Media, Die!

  3. David Brown says:
    August 7, 2008 at 10:48 am

    I'm a conservative (paleo-con) who reads the Times and likes it. Where else can one get so many facts? Sure it has a nutty liberaly editorial bent and it does run politicized stories. It has opinions that are often wrong. So what. Where else are you gonna get this much information so cheap.

    If anything we need more newspapers like the Times. What we are getting is brain dead sensationalizatiom. Anybody watched Fox or CNN these days? PATHETIC.

  4. charles Keating says:
    August 7, 2008 at 10:39 pm

    How does everybody feel about C-SPAN, especially Washington Journal every day at 7AM EST? At least there when people call in, apropos the print news of the day & the guest interviewee, you can get a slight feel of what Americans (& sometimes foreigners)
    think about taboo issues.

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