As the world kept him thinking in turns so would the blank, empty, undiluted space in the upper right corner of his unimaginative American blog. It left itself for last - as if it knew it was much too smart for him - as if the search bar that had once been there was an overture to another space in time - as if that corner meant more than it really did.
Newspaper
Each day it comes… lands in the driveway… gets rained on… gets folded and ripped and pissed on. Everyday it comes and lines the cages of scared and broken animals. Everyday it pretends to break news, to inform, to be relevant. Everyday it peddles ink on paper with an aging, Lomanesque determination that makes a few think that maybe, just maybe there might be a future in that kind of everyday. If we just adjust the format… a daily MAGAZINE!!! A new and bold style change… a daily print run of four color wonder that if we get lucky will fool people into thinking that a daily print run makes sense… if we get lucky people won’t notice that we’re giving them stale news on dead trees… if we get lucky nobody will notice that we’re forcing something that is loose, shifting, ethereal and transient into a fixed format… if we get lucky they won’t notice that we’re taking something that thrives in the developing present and we’re killing it by presenting it via the historical past. If we get lucky they won’t see that is just doesn’t work anymore… not everyday.
[...] This seems off to me. Ultimately the problems newspapers face aren’t really problems of style or design… they are fundamental problems that stem from the fact that developing stories (the guts of a daily paper) thrive in a more flexible distribution model… a digital model. The whole notion of a printed daily is becoming increasingly absurd and it doesn’t really matter whether what’s printed looks like a newspaper or a magazine. The nature of daily content requires that it be distributed in a digital format… printing it is much the same as choking it (a point that drives this post on my other, more creatively driven blog, paragraph). [...]