Newspapers, the primal love along with radio and movies

We get the NYT delivered to our home here in Texas. $58/month. That's a lot, but we love it. But we're old school newspaper lovers. I probably started reading the Times when I was 12. It's what being a grown up was all about. And later, the career media I aspired to. I went another direction, but still love the New York Times. Though i don't quite read it everyday anymore, and haven't for awhile. I skim. But relish in the moments when we can sit together and the smart world comes to me to interact with. I love the online edition too - it's particularly great for easy sharing like I'm about to do here: But it's not the paper itself. You don't get the same easy happenstance. I hate to be an old codger mourning, but I love newspapers and magazines, and really don't want to see them disappear. I feel the same way about smart movies in movie theatres and radio programmed by real individuals in my community. But newspapers, primal.

The Media Equation

Mourning Old Media’s Decline

By DAVID CARR

Published: October 28, 2008

The news that Google settled two longstanding suits with book authors and publishers over its plans to digitize the world’s great libraries suggests that some level of détente could be reached between old media and new.

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Melanie Stetson Freeman/The Christian Science Monitor

Employees of The Monitor looking through a prototype of a weekly newsmagazine that will supplement the Web site.

If true, it can’t come soon enough for the news business.

It’s been an especially rotten few days for people who type on deadline. On Tuesday, The Christian Science Monitor announced that, after a century, it would cease publishing a weekday paper. Time Inc., the Olympian home of Time magazine, Fortune, People and Sports Illustrated, announced that it was cutting 600 jobs and reorganizing its staff. And Gannett, the largest newspaper publisher in the country, compounded the grimness by announcing it was laying off 10 percent of its work force — up to 3,000 people.

Clearly, the sky is falling. The question now is how many people will be left to cover it.

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