The Washington Post has recently slimmed down its Sunday paper. They did away with Sunday Source (which I thought was a ridiculous concept from the get-go
) a few months back. Then a few weeks ago, they moved a bunch of other stuff around, rolled a couple of classified sections together, and did away with the separate Book World section.
Now it takes me only a couple of hours to read the Sunday paper. Which I guess is a good thing, in a way. But I miss the old marathon. Yesterday, when I finished the paper, I was going, "That's it?"
The Rocky Mountain News went belly-up a couple of weeks ago, after something like 150 years of daily editions. And the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is now going to be online-only.
There's been a fair amount of hand-wringing in journalism circles over this. Some blame the newspapers themselves for sticking by a 19th-century technology, saying they should have transitioned to a subscription-based web format years ago, because now people are used to getting their news for free online.
I saw a story in my J-school alumni mag saying that even students in so-called print journalism today should expect to have to shoot video for their paper's website. That's not very far afield from the "one-man band" setups that small-market TV stations have used since the dawn of the vacuum tube. Everything old is new again.
I keep thinking that with my broadcasting background, I'm now perfectly positioned to get a job in newspapering.