Here’s the latest installment on this ongoing (but dying?) feature of my blog.

Why might it be dying? Because today represents the first time in six days that I’ve read the Los Angeles Times. This is Very Bad News for them. Not because I am in some way a significant readership in myself, but because I represent their most significant readership: inveterate newspaper readers. That would certainly include me. Since boyhood I’ve read the paper on a daily basis, sometimes fighting for sections over the breakfast table. That is probably what propelled me into journalism (that, plus the opportunity to see my name quickly put into print). In my teens I was getting published in fanzines, and then magazines, and in my late teens I was getting published in newspapers. I became a beat reporter, then an entertainment reporter editing his own features, then a copy editor, then senior copy editor, then the production editor of a daily newspaper, all before hitting 25. I love newspapers, and until today I hadn’t read one in a week. If I’m going to drift away so easily, what can print editions forecast about casual readers?

Reading the print edition of today’s L.A. Times has reminded me of a few conclusions I’d previously made:

1. The “news” in the newspaper isn’t news. The Times was smart enough to put a story about the quote unquote president’s detente meeting with Democrats deep inside the first section. Why deep inside? Because I read this story online from another publication yesterday afternoon. A full 24 hours later it carries all the newsworthiness of the Hindenburg disaster coverage. With some news stories, 24 minutes later feels too late.
2. Features and “uncovered news” are more interesting, whether or not they’re relevant. I read the story about the Arizona councilman who won’t give the pledge of allegiance because he’s protesting the war in Iraq. (I don’t like the war in Iraq, but I don’t like sitting out the pledge of allegiance either. Evidently I would fit right in with his constituents, who are hopping mad.) I also read the feature “She earns more, and that’s okay.” At times, that has been the situation at our family HQ here and I was interested in the experience of others. I’m also hooked on Steve Lopez’s column, especially his recent string of columns about — you guessed it — LA’s impenetrable traffic situation, which has engendered the paper’s Bottleneck blog (which here includes a picture of the 405 on Friday).
3. On a related note, there seems to be no home-page link on the Times’ site to its own Book Review. I searched up and down. That’s sad. In a way, I don’t blame them — I think we can guess the extent of people’s interest in the books section if they’re not even reading the paper — but in another way (the way that thinks of newspapers as needing to benefit the community) I think it should be there. If you click on “All Sections,” a sitemap comes up that links to Books, but there is no direct link to Books from the home page, and so nothing to make you think about using the Times site to read about Books. Even after using that link to go to the Books section, I can’t find a link to what I want to link to here: A review of the “new” Philip K. Dick book. The only way to find it, finally, is to do a search of the website — and this obscurity is perfectly ironic given that the piece is also about Dick’s desperate desire to be accepted in his lifetime as a mainstream writer.

I’m going to write about this review, and Dick, in my next post. But first here’s my conclusion with regard to the Times: the paper’s readership (as well as its staffing and coverage) is shrinking. Its online environment is encouraging, but lacking. So to truly “read” the L.A. Times, one needs to read both editions (else I would never have seen the Philip K. Dick piece, for one) — and it is asking us to do that in an era when we have less time than ever to read either edition at all.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 4th, 2007 at 1:59 pm and is filed under On reading, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.