"Who Said Newspapers Are Dead?" Thread

I like taking photos of people holding newspapers ... in the airport, on the train, anywhere really.

It's the way people hold the papers, or roll them up and squeeze them while on the move, or fold them up and shove 'em in their back pockets.

You don't see many people reading the newspaper in public.

Here's one on a train from Brussels to Amsterdam last month ...



Here's one at the Rensselaer Train Station a few years back. He kind of reminded me of spnited.



I'll post more as I find them.

 

As an aside, this was an interesting way to utilize ... white space.

 

Loads of my fellow commuters (including Mrs. Huggy) grab the free papers (there are two) at the train station to read on the way in. I rarely see anyone with a hard copy of the Star, Sun, National Post or Globe and Mail but I would think some people are checking them out on their phones.

 

After seeing the shit they try to pull during the process of getting an obituary published, I will NEVER buy another print newspaper again. Fuck them.

If I could extract the decade of sweat equity I put into them too, I would.

 

I'm Jekyll and Hyde when it comes to obits.

On the one hand ... I've been taking them over the phone (in the 1990s), editing them and laying them out for 22 years at weekly and smaller daily papers. It's an important job in the newsroom, and I do take pride in catching mistakes and making them fit.

But MC's right about what a ripoff and hassle it is to get an obit in a large metro paper these days. I've done it a couple times in recent years for grandparents, and the screw-ups and obscene cost are not what you need immediately after losing a loved one.

 

One day many decades hence, when your grandchildren ask you, “Grandma, what was a newspaper?” you can direct them back to Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2016. Because it may well go down as the day the American newspaper as we’ve known it moved out of intensive care and into the palliative wing on its way to the Great Beyond.


1, "Great Beyond" is a term I coined.

2, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/05/b...urvive-the-newspaper.html?mwrsm=Facebook&_r=0

 

Thanks for inventing "Great Beyond."

 

No problem. Figured I should give something back.

 

Costs for two small "death notices" when my dad died a couple years ago were about 10 percent of the tab at the funeral home. When I see five pages of death notices in a paper, I know how they're staying afloat.

 

Death is a growth industry.

 

The mortality rate is 100 percent.