The End Times: Is News Fit To Print?, Part 2

Note: This particular photo is not from my own, very lovely, alma mater.

I cleared out of my house in Washington, DC this past week in a post-graduation rush, and had to get rid of all the accumulated debris of the last year. Packing up has been pretty nightmarish in the past (see freshman year, when i brought 20+ pairs of flip flops alone to school), but this year actually wasn't that bad; moving in two suitcases and a backpack to France and then the same back to DC helped cut down on the clutter. I did have a couple of firehazards I didn't manage to eradicate though: piles of 30 or 35 newspapers Hoyas, Voices, Posts, Times. Moral of the story: I'm a print media pack rat.

I managed to talk myself into tossing most of them - probably didn't need the Tuesday crosswords from mid-October. But a couple of them - a particularly nice photo of construction workers on the front page, the controversial April Fool's issue of the campus newspaper - I couldn't quite throw away. After a year of benefitting from USA Today's collegiate readership program, maybe I'm just reluctant to give up all the great free papers I got.

You'll notice I didn't mention hoarding any Gannett publications (Gannett is the publisher of USA Today, and other non-news-snob-friendly outlets); as I suspect may be the case on many university campuses which participate in the program, the sponsor newspapers were always the last to go. Educated people, or those who hope to become so, still snatch up real live papers - especially when they can get their hands on them for free (or the several tens of thousands of dollars that tuition costs - however you choose to look at it). Maybe a sign of hope? At the very least, the Washington Posts for the taking in the coffee shop are just one of the many things I was reluctant to leave behind this weekend.

History Wonk Band Names

... too bad I have zero musical abilities

1. Robert Capa’s Mexican Suitcase
2. The Defenestration of Prague
3. Jeremy and the Benthamites
4. Tycho Brahe’s Metal Nose
5. The XYZ Affair
6. Triumph and the Wills

The End Times: Is News Fit To Print?, Part 1

In a weirdly incestuous newspaper cycle, I just got not one, but two emails from my WaPo breaking news alerts heralding the demise of The Boston Globe by the hand of the weakening Grey Lady. The Post is reporting that Arthur Ochs Sulzberger and Co. have filed 60 day notice of closure with federal authorities in the wake of failed union negotiations. Speculation is that this may just be a particularly hard-line bargaining measure to break writers, mailers, and printers down further, but it is certainly not without a whiff of industry demise. To threaten such extreme measures, whether or not they are empty, exposes the rotting financial state of America's newspapers to the public. There isn't much mystery left...

I can't help but think of one of the hundred great lines from Paul Simon's Graceland: "Everybody sees you're blown apart,
Everybody sees the wind blow." This is almost unforgivably bad, I will be the first to admit, but I'm a print media sentimentalist. The front-page photos marking the shuttering of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer were heartrending when I happened to pick up the times a few weeks ago, and I really don't know what I'll do if the Times-Picayune closes; no one could ever match that for names.

Seeing the best and brightest of the golden age of objectivity so vulnerable is sad and slightly terrifying not just because its the kind of industry I might once have hoped to work in; not just because, to paraphrase the Guardian, people are facing a world without reliable news for the first time since the Enlightenment (the Enlightenment!). It is also because I love doing the crossword puzzle; because in the fifth grade, when I wasn't allowed to see Titanic, I saved the Arts and Entertainment section with a half-page photo of Leonardo DiCaprio during filming; because my grandmother used to ship me comics sections from the Omaha World-Herald by the box because in that department at least, the Times had nothing on it; because everyone I grew up with got their name - or picture - in our local paper at least once, and sent a copy to all their relatives; because my list of life goals includes worming my way into the Vows section; because my father has the front page from when the Berlin Wall fell; because I remember the first day that the Times printed in color - it was sometime during Lewinskygate; because I used to pull the blue newspaper sleeves over my shoes on rainy days to puddle jump.

Don't get me wrong. The internet, or hearsay, or whatever it is we've chosen to replace this can do some pretty great stuff too, I'm sure. But without real media, new media won't have anything to reblog, or mock, or debunk. Without real live papers you miss out on wedding announcements for scrapbooks, or clippings for your grandparents, or historical records for your kids. Newspapers make stuff real. Meta-news just doesn't make for great rainboots.