Madness, and a Little Sadness
I have my laptop set up in two-screen mode (one onboard, one external) when I’m in my office, and I spent way too much of the weekend watching March Madness on one screen and telling myself I was multitasking on the other. By the end of Saturday, I had foregone the deceit and had a game going on each screen, one Purdue-Washington and the other Duke-Texas. At one point, both were in the final minute and either tied or within 2 points.
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We’re adjusting to the loss of the newspaper we’ve subscribed to since 1975, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. We’ve been fortunate during that period to have two daily newspapers with two sets of personalities and gradations (I wouldn’t say polar opposites) of political persuasion. Oddly, the P-I, owned by Hearst, was the slightly more liberal paper, while the local family-controlled Times was more idiosyncratically conservative, reflecting, probably, the humors of its splenetic publisher.
I think the competition was great for the city, perhaps tempering the tendency of a paper to become a cheerleader and mouthpiece of the local establishment. I thrilled in the 80s when the PI took as its mission the scourging of our Reaganesque Democrat governor, Dixy Lee Ray. Dixy was an unflinchingly pro-development shill who never heard of an energy project she wouldn’t stump for, whether it was a supertanker port, an under-Sound oil pipeline or the archipelago of nuclear plants known as WPPSS. A character appearing in a comic strip by the PI’s editorial cartoonist named Dipstick Duck sat in judgment.
The PI continues in truncated form as a web-only venture, and the “thunk” on our porch each morning now heralds the arrival of The Times. We would probably discontinue taking a daily, but my MIL, who lives with us, takes pleasure in a paper with her breakfast. Since I’ve been reading both papers online for several years and seldom actually handled the newsprint version, I can’t gauge the feeling of emptiness expressed by those for whom that tactility is a big part of their news-reading experience. But a lot of distinctive voices in sports, arts, reportage and editorial have been silenced, and I will certainly miss their part of the local news chorus.
It is a shame about the demise of the newspaper edition of the PI. I sense that a lot of city papers are going to go that way. We stopped having a newspaper delivered years ago and have been enjoying reading many of them online. I have wondered which papers I would continue to peruse if we were asked to pay a little fee for the pleasure.
I’ve wondered about how that would work since the old days of AOL packaged-content. I would pay to read the newspapers I flit about to, but it would have to either be a per-visit nickel or dime, or a monthly charge to access all of them. I certainly would resist having to individually subscribe to each.
What I worry about is the (further) dissolution of investigative journalism. As disappointed as we were during the Bush administration with the amen-corner press, it can get worse.