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.