Several items of note regarding the plight of the newspaper industry have come to my attention of late. This assumes, for instance, that there is such a thing as the "newspaper industry" at this point, disparate from the multimedia conglomerates, and such a thing as a "plight" disparate from the current financial crisis.
In particular, a college friend of mine, who still works in the industry, called my attention to one of many "save the newspaper" causes that have sprung up on various social networking websites. He also pointed out a piece at the Atlantic on the subject. Much of my daily reading is in the online gaming press, and one of the more popular outlets, Kotaku, also has ex-newspaper employees there, and they have mentioned the situation that their local paper is now in (here and here). I felt a need to somehow explain my relative lack of enthusiasm for this concept.
Given my own personal history it is somewhat difficult to come to terms with these events. Since I have not ever worked as a professional journalist and have not worked in publishing of any kind, in any capacity (save several different blogs) for more than a decade, it may be that my thoughts on this subject are outdated, or irrelevant, or that I have insufficient personal investment in the related issues for my opinion to carry much weight.
Nonetheless, newspapers do hold special significance to me. Learning to drink coffee and reading a daily paper, in my case The Boston Globe, formed a rite of passage into what I then considered adulthood. A change of schools and a change of majors in my first year of college landed me in a liberal arts program and on the editorial boards of two publications, a biweekly college paper and a somehwat more irregularly published literary magazine. At the latter, I learned the rudiments of electronic page layout, and at the former I applied them, eliminating the manual typewriter and typesetting system then in use. (This was in 1991, if you can believe that-- the desktop publishing revolution that Apple wrought in the mid-1980s still had not filtered as far as my suburban college's student newspaper six years later, despite the fact that the campus was lousy with Macintosh computers, everywhere except the newspaper office. Meanwhile, thousands were spent each year on typesetting.) That pattern repeated itself in graduate school, and followed me into my first jobs, where I found that being on the technical side of things paid better and better suited my personality. I worked at a local daily for about three years but later moved into doing similar tasks for nonprofit organizations. At that daily I initiated the paper's website, and went on to either establish or modernize sites at other organizations. Perhaps if I'd had more sense (or, rather, less sense and more vision) I'd simply have dropped out of graduate school in 1994 and gone directly into web design after seeing the first versions of NCSA mosaic; instead I mocked it as being silly and slow compared to Gopher.
