Ralph’s Market off of
Sports Arena Boulevard in San Diego is laid out like most grocery stores: a
produce section on your right as you walk in, a bakery to the left, and somewhere
in the middle aisles, a magazine section. I was looking for a San Diego Chronicle, or at least a USA Today. My son has an
ongoing current events assignment for his government class, which for some
archaic reason requires compiling actual news clippings – no photocopies. Not
too hard, right? Most students have had similar high school assignments; I used
to cut up my parents’ Time magazine on a regular basis.
“Do you carry newspapers?” I asked one of the cashiers.
“Oh . . . ." She looked around. “Sure, right on that, that thing
over there.” She pointed to a freestanding set of shelves near the balloons.
I thanked her. “I think it’s called a newsstand,”
I said.
The word is passing out of common vocabulary along with papers themselves. Soon
Starbucks will offer nothing but table-mounted e-readers, diner-style like
jukeboxes, for anyone who might have come in without a laptop. In my search I
have tried street-corner newspaper vending machines in three different cities.
These seem to not actually dispense;
they simply roll your quarters back out at you to give the illusion of
occasional function, like the nearby pedestrian walk buttons.
There is one type of paper that’s thriving and always easy to find:
When the world changes over completely
to virtual paper I will miss the actual pages of books: the feel of them
turning, the way they are all present simultaneously, and the way they
avail themselves for notes. I
don’t feel the same about newspapers, which are smelly, messy, and wasteful.
On-line subscriptions are the ideal form for rapidly changing written news, and
I’ll gladly pay just to keep my recycling bin from overflowing.
The tabloids at least have some heft to them; the thickness of current-day Newsweek or Time is, to the micron, that of the
following line of type:
CHEAPCHEAPCHEAPCHEAPCHEAPCHEAPCHEAPCHEAPHEAPCHEAPCHEAPCHEAPCHEAPCHEAP
The non-subscription price of each weekly is
$4.99 for about fifty pages, which is the price per page of a photocopy at the
public library. Maybe my son’s teacher is a Newsweek stockholder. I imagine that
their continued existence is for the sole purpose of eventually convincing
die-hards that buying the on-line version is by far the superior choice.
Credible news writers need to be paid. Here’s something for anyone who
doesn’t already read Doonesbury:
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