Not Missing the Newspaper
In my last post I mentioned that the internet had pretty much replaced the morning paper for me. I realize now that it isn’t quite true. There are two things that I used to enjoy immensely about the morning paper that simply don’t occupy any time on my daily rounds through the internet; comic strips and crosswords. I suppose there are more comic strips available on the internet than there ever were on the newspaper page, but they are almost universally difficult to read on the computer screen and usually take more time to download than seems right. A black and white line drawing shouldn’t take more than ten or fifteen seconds to load, but on some of the more popular comic strips’ websites fifteen seconds is actually pretty good. I was reading Gasoline Alley on a regular basis for a while there. You could almost see Uncle Walt age during the time it took the pages to load. I probably shouldn’t criticize the comics for being too small and difficult to read on the internet since the newspapers have let the comic strips get so small that they can scarcely be read there either. I really love comics–in many ways I’m nothing but a frustrated cartoonist–but I don’t love the way that bad art is ruining the comics page. Anymore a cartoonist like Walt Kelly or Alex Raymond would be unwanted on the comics page since his art would be unreprducible on the average comic page since that type of line work is too lush and delicate to be accurately reproduced at postage stamp size. In some ways the bad reproduction has shifted the emphasis from the art to the writing. I have to admit that this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In the past some strips, Flash Gordon chief among them, were known for great art and vapid writing. And in all fairness, I’m not sure that great art would make Dilbert a better Comic strip. In some ways I think it’s better to have a primitive Dilbert that is actually drawn by Scott Adams than it would be to have a lush Dilbert drawn by another hand. My gut feeling is that newspapers in general and the comics page in particular won’t survive without undergoing a drastic change in the next ten years or so. Unless newspapers reassert the primacy of content over timeliness they won’t have a selling point. The news you read in this morning’s paper is the news you read on yesterday’s internet. Timeliness simply isn’t a factor that they can offer anymore. There is no such thing as a newspaper scoop anymore. Now all they can do is offer in-depth reporting and unique content. That, of course, is more typically the province of a weekly paper, and I imagine that is where all of the big papers are heading.
The crossword puzzle on the other hand suffers almost the opposite affliction. It’s not that I can’t find a crossword puzzle on the internet or that they are difficult to read. Quite the contrary, there must be a hundred sites that have high quality crosswords available for free. And you can work them ten or twenty a day if you want to. Which is kind of the problem. I become sated with them rather quickly at that rate. Aside from that, there is no element of pleasant frustration when you can’t get the last five blanks filled in. Most crosswords on the internet have the answers available at the click of a mouse. I miss having to wait until tomorrow to find out that “orts” is a perfectly good word. Some things just don’t need to be hyped up to warp speed; crosswords are one of them.
I guess I don’t miss the morning paper at all, but I kind of miss the world in which it was relevant. There was something special about The Sunday paper that the internet hasn’t been able to duplicate or supercede. It’s a shame the newspapers have been so adamant about abdicating the cozy position they once held. If only the internet smelled like wet ink and newsprint.