Letters to the Editor
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Nice thought, but newspapers are old news
After years of having to shuffle through tons of sections in the newspaper just to find an article I was looking for, going online for news information is a much less painful and easier process. Newspapers did their job just fine in the years before the rise of the internet, but with constantly updated stories and headlines available at the click of a button, newspapers seem to have outlived their usefullness. Add to the fact that websites like craigslist are stealing most of the classifieds away as well, and it looks like the paper is but a couple of decades from extinction...
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meh..
cool people dont go to starbucks they go to obscure/bohemian street cafes. mafia kingpins read the papers and take their coffe in the pub! and this may surprise you but leggy blondes also read the paper while they simultaneously smoke and wear channel 5. Other than that I do think that you are right about the charm of reading a newspaper, depends what paper though.
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decline...
It used to be men fought eachother with bronze weapons. It took courage, will, patient acquisition of skill, and intelligence.
There are other types. Skilled craftsmen, ditch diggers, bakers, artists. This is not the same kind of manliness, but is not entirely depraved.
Then there are the thinkers -- people who believe in the reality of thought. They read books and even newspapers, and hope to achieve skill or even profundity in the art of thinking. If this happens, then will and courage and pain follow, so it can be called a man.
Then there are those fellows who "wiggle and think" for a living, hunched over their computers, interactively entertaining themselves in a cocoon of mental masturbation. This is very seldom profoundly fruitful. Even if a woman wants such a fellow, it is not because he is manly.
p.s. I write software for a living.
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Really?
First No Name: Clearly, you did not read Keillor's article. Either that or you read it with your mind already made up to dismiss what he was saying. Your loss.
Second No Name: I don't think I've ever seen a leggy blonde wearing a "channel". Would that be a TV channel? The English channel? Please enlighten us.
GK: Once again, a hit out of the park. You're quite right about the difference between reading a newspaper and a laptop, at least in public. It is rather unnerving seeing all those hunched figures mesmerized by the screen, not caring what they look like to the world.
And there definitely is a style to reading a paper that is slowly disappearing, one that Bogie and Tracy, et. al., brought to life with such appeal. It's in a class with the cigarette language which the stars of the 30's and 40's used so eloquently, and which has now vanished, of course. It may be more "convenient" (although how lugging around an 8-pound laptop is more so than carrying a newspaper, I don't know), but it's definitely another step down on the ladder of style. Alas.
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hardly a newspaper out there worth reading
i'm in san francisco. the chronicle has the staff of two papers combined, puts out a thin, weak brew of tea ... conceived by marketers ... no vision ... no balls ... a couple of critics and jon carrol, that's about it for anything worth reading.
I agree with Garrison about the joy of reading a real newspaper, but the LA Tines is getting weird, the NY Times is a little much (for me) ... and the Chronicle ... what a sad story.
The age of the marketer has eclipsed everything.
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Era of the Newspaper?
For all those announcing the death of the newspaper: the print news sector is no longer growing fast enough for the big corporations. There's still money being made.
I'm 25; been reading newspapers, some better than others, since I was thirteen. My university students (yo soy TA!) read the student newspaper rag, which is deplorable, assiduously.
As much as I hate Dear Abby, I still take three seconds to scan it. Part of the beauty of the newspaper is how bad the writing is, and enjoying complaining about it.
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The LA Times beats the hell out of Salon
The physical object of a newspaper may be old news, but the information gathering process that developed as print journalism is what we depend on for real information.
For example -- what's actually going on in Sacramento, instead of what Salon's editors think they can profit politically from telling you.
If you want to know, for example, that Arnold is a monstrously evil right winger, you can get that from reading a blog or from Salon.
Sure, the article will be very beautfilly written. But still, you won't learn any of the complicating facts that would spoil the point that the author's exquisite prose was constructed to make look inescapable.
If you want to know how California came to be under a federal court order to reform its prison system and you want to know where Arnold stands on that issue, and what he has proposed to solve that crisis, and whether or not Democrats have aided or impeded him in that quest -- sorry but you have no choice but to read the LA Times.
We still need traditional newspapers -- whether we read them online or in hard copy.
Even Salon couldn't survive without newspapers, because all they really do here is cherry pick news reported by real journalists.
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Garrison Tells Us How to Be Cool
Hm. Only a few weeks after being scolded for being unAmerican, humorless, legalistic, and not having a life because some of us don't want to celebrate Christmas, Keillor is now instructing us in the fine art of newspaper reading so we can "demonstrate cool."
I'm beginning to think he's losing it, honestly.
Deconstructing this article is almost like shooting fish in a barrel, but a few points:
o) One can only wonder about the advisability of a 64 year-old white male from Minnesota providing instructions on being "cool." What next, odes to the greatness of big band music, and laments about rock and roll?
o) All the "cool" people he cites are--not to put too fine a point on it--dead.
o) It's a bit laughable that Keillor is insulting and denigrating folks who read online publications--those drooling, glazed-eyed, stiff drones. Garrison, ol' buddy: they're you're audience. Did you, um, forget that important point?
o) I have never seen a leggy blonde crossing a Starbucks leaving a trail of cigarette smoke and Chanel No. 5. Aside from the fact that I don't know of anyone these days who wears Chanel No. 5 (my grandmother did, but she died in 1990), there's no smoking in Starbucks. Not even for leggy blondes.
o) I don't know where he lives, but buying three or four papers around here would only be an exercise in frustration. Personally, I don't really want three copies of the Austin American Statesman and a USA Today.
I could go on, believe me, but it would be silly. The big point Keillor is missing is actually fairly simple, and one other letter-writers have already pointed out: what papers out there are worth reading any more?
Either Keillor is being bitingly sarcastic, or he has lost it completely. Salon readers: you decide!