To be sure, how well they’ll fare, or even whether they’ll survive, in their new incarnation as super blogs or 24/7 electronic news spewers knows no man (or woman). After pulling thoughtfully on their chins and squinting wisely, the venerable sages proclaim the source of the papers’ travails is that the press moguls lack a good business plan (as makers of buggy whips early in the last century could have told them, sometimes the only truly good business plan for dying businesses is interment).
The accepted wisdom is that what brought newspapers to their current low estate was a deadly double whammy of deep recession and killer competition from the Internet. We have no quarrel with that, although we suspect that a creeping vogue for illiteracy is playing a role as well. But we also think the news is to blame: It’s so darn repetitious that, it pains us to say, readers get awfully bored with it.
Just by way of example, how many times — indeed, how many years, now — have we picked up our favorite paper to be confronted by a boldface headline screaming at us that the incorrigible nukenik, North Korea, is getting ready to blow up the world? Frankly, we’re tired of reading about it. OK, if they finally blow up the world, swell, then we’ll be happy to read about it.
We’re the first to admit we don’t count foreign policy among our areas of expertise (which aren’t exactly numerous in any case, once you get past martinis and pro football), but it mystifies us why, what with all those myriad pundits in the State Department, not one in over half a century has ever suggested sending Kim Jong Il, North Korea’s diminutive supreme leader, a nice pair of elevator shoes. Then he wouldn’t always be the shortest guy in the room and, we guarantee, his hostility toward the rest of the mankind would inexorably melt away.
And why — while we’re on the subject of no-news news — does it warrant front-page coverage that one of our big auto makers is going bankrupt ? For gosh sakes, everyone knows that the car makers don’t make their money selling cars anymore. They get their dough by filing for Chapter 11, confident that Uncle Sam feeds them a few billion here, a few billion there, to tide them over. Sure beats having to come out with a new model every year.
As an ink-stained wretch from way back, we’d hate to give the misimpression that we feel newspapers are dispensable. They’re not. And we confess to a lifelong addiction to them. No other medium comes close to the exhaustive (even if sometimes exhausting) coverage they offer. A case very much in point is the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court.
Among the many details of Ms. Sotomayor’s life that all those long columns devoted to her background, education and career revealed was this little-noted gem. She entered Princeton in 1972, a couple of months or so after Samuel A. Alito Jr., one of George W. Bush’s appointments to the court, graduated from that ivy-clad institution. Women had been admitted to Princeton a scant few years earlier, and the surge in their presence at the university stirred protest by some of the grumpier male alumni, including, as it emerges, Mr. Alito.
We can hardly wait to see the interaction between the two as they take their respective places on the bench (let’s hope they sit side by side). Enjoy the frozen smiles and kindred gestures of collegiality. Keep a careful eye on the body language and the darting glances at each other. It has the promise of a terrific hoot — and whatever our age, circumstances and political persuasion, we’d all be the poorer for having missed a memorable spectacle, were it not for our ailing but gallant gazette.
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