I’ve read a couple of articles recently about the death of print media. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy, I say.
Here’s the thing: back in the day (pre-kidlets), I used to enjoy reading a newspaper on Saturdays, having coffee on the balcony. We had nothing pressing on Saturday mornings. Through the rest of the week, I’d go through the newspaper at work during break. That’s a total of 15 minutes. I often read all I needed to read. A lot of the big stories were CP or AP or Reuters. In those stories written for the paper (or, more likely, the corp that owned it), there was a dearth of considered analysis, and lots of sensationalism.
I’ve never been a big TV news watcher.
These days, I get all the news I need from Google News as an aggregator. When I want analysis, I have a selection of blogs–their biases known to me–for that. There’s even forums. The Senate forum on Circus Maximus gives me lots of opinion, lots of links to deeper analysis, and regularly I get the funny thrown in for free.
I’m sorry that the digital revolution has decided to bury newspapers much as it buried the tired distribution models for music and movies (though neither industry seems totally willing to accept that yet). The thing is, don’t come at me like this is some kind of cultural tragedy when the newspaper paradigm that had value–the one that believed the newspapers’ role was to deliver news–disappeared into the “business” paradigm, in which sensationalism sells, we want money, so lets go sensational!
Talk about hoist with their own petards.
I still have the internet and CBC Radio 1 to keep me informed and entertained. You had your chance, newspapers. I gave up on you long ago.