Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Newspapers

It's sad to see that newspapers are becoming a thing of the past. Mind you, I had P cancel the Minneapolis Star/Tribune when they endorsed Coleman, I still think that Minneapolis should have a (solvent) newspaper.

The St Paul newspaper is unforgivably provincial and we've never subscribed to it, even though we've lived in St Paul for over 20 years now. We may have subscribed when we moved here, but we discovered that the movie listings did not include anything showing in Minneapolis. They totally lost us at that point.

In fact, the only (hardcopy) newspaper we get now is the Sunday New York Times. Last Sunday there was a spread on Portland, Oregon in the travel section, which happens to be the city Girl-child chose for a summer destination this year.

Did you know there's a velvet painting museum in Portland? I can hardly wait.

Anyway, getting back to newspapers, so I started reading the Doris Kearns Goodwin book on Lincoln's political genius, Team of Rivals, and I was struck by the mention of how many newspapers existed in the middle of the 19th century. I mean, there used to be two in Minneapolis when I was a kid (the Star and the Tribune, then consolidated into the StarTribune, and now insolvent). But in the 1840s even moderately sized cities had half a dozen or more newspapers.

I don't care that Internet has oodles of information, it's just not the same.

Actually, what I want is my newspapers on the Internet.

But I'm not ready for a Kindle.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I completely agree with you about the St. Paul paper -- it is the only daily paper that we can have delivered here, and we decided it sucked. So no daily newspaper for nearly ten years; that sucked, too, but I guess we were just ahead of the curve on that one. I do mourn the loss of newspaper, though. Just today I found this:
http://prototype.nytimes.com/gst/articleSkimmer/
which, while it doesn't duplicate the experience of paging through the paper, it is better than the ad-filled home page of the NYT.

Ironic said...

I have a Kindle, and yet I still love reading the hard copy of the newspaper. Not just because I have friends who work for the media, but also because it reminds me of my childhood.
As for Portland, I have a sister who lives there, so if you want any info, let me know.