Interesting. I watched Road to Peridition last night, a mob-type movie about a man and his son in a tight spot and one scene in particular caught my eye: The two of them head into what I think was Al Capone's headquarters in Chicago and while the boy waits for his father he sits in a giant room full of rows of chairs, every last one of them filled with a man - in a suit - reading the newspaper.
Newspapers are one of those ubiquitous items in everyday life, always there on the coffee table from the day before, wrapped around presents of the poor, crumpled in the garbage and covered in paint smears from some child's art project, wrapped tightly and smacked against an ass, even fluttering down the street sometimes like a scene out of American Beauty.
And yet, newspapers have a lifespan. Newspapers won't always be here. Some day we will get up one morning to find our doorstep bare just as we now find our back stoop empty of fresh milk. Newspapers are on the way out.
Earlier this month the LA Times announced that it was shutting down it's daily national edition. It wasn't a long-standing paper by any means, at only 13 years young, but the reasons cited for the decision are potentially more foreshadowing for the rest of the industry:
"Over time, other electronic ways of reaching [Washington DC and New York] audiences became more plentiful," Times spokesperson Martha Goldstein said.
Some university professors studying garbage and decay rates once dug deep into a Philadelphia landfill and found fully-preserved half-eaten hot dogs, steaks, and they even found newspapers. Fully readable. Almost completely in tact. They read about the wind-down of World War II. They read about the local sports teams. I'm not sure what they did with the newspapers when they were done, though.. probably just threw them away.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.
the guys: philogynist jaime tony - the gals:raymi raspil
