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Technical Difficulties

Dinosaurs for sale

What’s so wrong with anachronisms? Newspapers only feel archaic to me when I explain to someone how the papers gets out even in the worst ice storms, such as we had earlier this month. It’s a litany I know well: Lines about deadlines and preventing bottlenecks and logjams (ugh) that can happen at any link in the production process. And that ends with the trucks who need plenty of time to get to your driveway though your street hasn’t been sanded.

Yet, I think while I’m reciting, if you’re connected, you could just link up to us up online, and you won’t even get your houseshoes soggy from shuffling out to the front walk for the paper.

(1. Don’t call it a dead tree edition unless you think the plastic in your computer comes from elves and believe that when you replace your tower or monitor the old ones have no toxins or radioactivity that require a special landfill.)

Yes, a newsPaper makes less and less sense. It’s proved even by the New Orleans newspaper that did keep on publishing but strictly electronically in the weeks following Katrina. Still, reports are that when it resumed printing, readers could not wait for hard copies.

Not everyone has a computer, and not everyone who has a computer can handle the Internet adeptly, and not everyone who is Web-savvy will want an electronic news summary then click to full reports. One thing even the best sites are short of is photos. NewsPapers have more pictures. We Web lovers should be happy for that; images slow downloads.

(2. The skill I lacked for a few years was electronic page design. I was competent at layout with a pencil, pica ruler and photo proportion wheel but then left the copy desk for wire and other editing. On March 31, I will have completed two years of paid work in two page design programs: Quark and InDesign. When the day comes that most news is delivered online, news sites will still need editors but layout will be obsolete. No back shop, no front shop. It’s html Heading 1 through Heading 6, down the screen.)

The few newspapers that have done away with stock pages are catching lots of complaints. The argument is that investors, even the most casual ones, get their closing numbers online so these fine-print pages are a waste of the publishers’ time and money.

But newspapers don’t want those kind of old fogey readers except to boost circulation. The readers they want are like the viewers TV claims to want: well-paid blokes and lasses who live to shop at places that buy advertising.

Bling!

Yet, relics still thrive. Downtowns still have a few shops that malls didn’t destroy. Department stores continue when Internet shopping gets faster and easier. Outlying shopping centers still fill a need that Wal-Mart doesn’t. (If you have health insurance why bother with the Wal-Mart pharmacy? Pick up your cough syrup somewhere convenient; the co-pay’s the same.)

Slurp!

High school and college bands still play at football and basketball games. For whom? Marching bands are so anachronistic that most of them use uniform styles that predate the Civil War! (And are just as scratchy.)

Spats!

You know why. When you spill coffee at breakfast, the newsPaper can blot it up. -30-

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