QotD: Newspapers

When you make the paper, you're city-wide, all day long. TV is nice, but TV is a running stream, and the moment it's done with you something else fills your place. When you finish reading a newspaper story about someone you know, the story's still there, right in your hands; you can fold it up and put it away, you can read it again, you can pass it to someone else, and all day when you pass the newspaper boxes or see the paper in the stores, you know the story's there. It has presence. It's a persistent, physical medium, and has no peers. Those who cheer its demise — as opposed to its rehabilitation — are shortsighted, to say the least. Towns need papers. I don't mean to prop up a strawman; most critics of the papers don't want them to vanish, and if newspapers do die it'll be suicide, not murder. But much of the criticism boils down to "JUMP!" in tenor and intent.

James Lileks, The Bleat, 2007-01-08