Is there a person alive who doesn’t lament the possible death of the American newspaper?
If so, then why is the American newspaper dying?
If we are all so concerned with the loss of the hometown newspaper, why aren’t people actually purchasing the newspaper? This reminds me of our shabby treatment of the independent bookstore.
Universally revered and essentially ignored by the masses.
Jason Kottke points to a Harper’s Magazine article Final Edition: The Twilight of the American Newspaper, and quotes the following text. It’s worth reading:
We will end up with one and a half cities in America — Washington, D.C., and American Idol. We will all live in Washington, D.C., where the conversation is a droning, never-advancing debate between “conservatives” and “liberals.” We will not read about newlyweds. We will not read about the death of salespeople. We will not read about prize Holsteins or new novels. We are a nation dismantling the structures of intellectual property and all critical apparatus. We are without professional book reviewers, art critics, and essays about what might mean that our local newspaper has died. We are a nation of Amazon reader responses (Moby Dick is “not a really good piece of fiction” — Feb. 14, 2009, by Donald J. Bingle, Saint Charles, Ill. — two stars out of five). We are without obituaries, but the famous will achieve immortality by a Wikipedia entry.
