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The Demise of Newspapers
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This has been excerpted from "How long can you go, WaPo?"
As a former newspaper reporter, I feel like a dirty traitor saying this: but I just might cancel our subscription to The Washington Post.
That's how much I hate what they've done with the paper.
A lot has happened to the paper in the past three years. A lot of crummy crap in my opinion.
It started when they dropped the "Life is Short" feature from the Sunday Style section. I loved that feature. It was the first thing I looked for when I opened the Sunday paper. And I wasn't alone. When I had my own 100-word piece published, friends, neighbors and strangers in the coffee shop stopped to tell me they saw my haiku. To a person, they told me it was the feature they looked forward to most.
A few months later, it was gone.
Then, in no particular order, the Post dropped Book World; folded a separate Arts section into Style on Sundays, ditched a stand-alone Business section; revamped the Weather page into something unhelpful and lamentable; created a Local Living insert that's not at all enticing and altogether forgettable; made the WP Magazine seem more like a cartoon than a periodical; and then, AND THEN....
A few days before Halloween, I pulled the paper out of the delivery bag to find what the paper's ombudsman described as "the most significant redesign in more than a decade."
Was this a trick? It certainly wasn't a treat!
And let me just say, I'm NOT a fan of the writer's portraits. Or the remodeled Reliable Source (it's bigger but definitely not better) and Date Lab features. The last of which was a topic at a recent Halloween party. Note to the Post: no one at the party liked the change or understood the reason for it.
The Post's ombudsman expressed surprise that so few readers told the paper what they thought about the change. And he noted that only 10 cancelled their subscriptions over the redesign. An editor at the paper suggested the reason may be because people are receptive to change.
I'll offer a different theory. How about this? We feel beat down and worn out by the changes and rather than wage an impossible battle, we disengage and give up. We bitch on Facebook or at parties. We yell at our spouses at the breakfast table, "Do you see what they've done now?
Can you read this? I can't read this. WHAT'S ANOTHER WORD FOR CRAP?"
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