Is the print media doomed?

This gravestone seems to indicate an ever increasing attitude toward our print media. Newspapers and magazines are reducing their staffs, downsizing their publications and becoming little more than a dinosaur in this day and age as people get more and more of their news from electronic media. But call me a print Luddite in that I love sitting on the sofa in the early morning hours before work, sipping coffee and reading my morning newspapers. Our local paper is made up of mostly wire report stuff that is repeated in the Akron newspaper, and the local paper doesn't even have a local editorial cartoonist anymore. They just pull stuff off of syndicated services that addresses national and international issues, but nothing local, and word now has it that the Akron paper, the Akron Beacon Journal, is headed for still more downsizing as it lays off still more of its staff. This time, it's some of my favorite writers and columnists - David Giffels, Carl Chancellor, Elaine Guregian, Brian Windhorst, sports writer Patrick McManaman, who took over from Terry Pluto, who bolted to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, editorial cartoonist Chip Bok (what are they going to do, replace him with a syndicated cartoonist that doesn't deal with local foibles?), Connie Bloom, Tracy Wheeler, and photographers Lew Stamp and Ken Love. I don't know what's going to be left of this newspaper when it finishes chopping out large sections of its news staff. It just depresses me to think of newspapers being reduced to a shadow of their former selves. It makes me wonder about what the future is for students of journalism. Will they become bloggers and Internet columnists? Will newspapers go the way of the dodo before long? Will they be reduced to little more than weekly broadsheets hardly worth reading? I guess more and more people are turning to the electronic media for their news, but I just can't fathom the idea of curling up on the sofa with a computer and a cup of coffee to read the daily news. I don't even own a laptop nor is it likely that I will be able to afford to buy one anytime soon, much as I'd like one to replace my oversized dinosaur of a desktop computer. I just wonder what the future is going to bring and if we'll see the end of books, magazines, newspapers and any kind of hard copy print. I hope not, but given what I'm seeing of late, I suspect that such a day is not far ahead of us.

THE OFFICE PRESIDENTIAL RIVALRY

OK, so it all started when I noticed that a co-worker had an "Obama for President" wallpaper on her computer screen. Then I found one I really liked, and changed my wallpaper to the one that I found declaring my desire to see Barack Obama elected President. So today, I walked by another co-worker's desk to find a McCain-Palin wallpaper on his screen. So I suspect that the political stakes in our office are being very clearly defined. This same McCain supporter daily seems to come up with yet another stupid rumor about Obama that he doubtless heard from some right wing screed, today's being some kind of alleged link between Obama and Kenyan Raila Odinga, who was in a disputed election in Kenya and, who this co-worker swears, favors a return to Sharia law and is a known terrorist and who Obama daily takes calls from because he's allegedly Obama's cousin, so therefore, Obama's a Muslim terrorist! Well, none of that's true, of course, but to have someone spreading those kinds of rumors in the office to potentially undecided voters is nothing short of just spreading lies about a candidate that it's been proven are not true. That's the problem with people who get their news from screeds like Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage and Ann Coulter, and who swear that everything those folks say is TRUTH! Sheesh! Well, all I can do is to smugly think to myself that this is just another blatant display of utter ignorance that people believe such trash about political candidates that has already been proven to be false and nothing more than smear mongering. Well, for that matter, I could say that Sarah Palin was found to have abused her power as Governor of Alaska (TRUTH!), and that McCain had ties to Charles Keating many years ago during the whole Savings and Loan blowout (TRUTH!) and that McCain favors more deregulation like the kind that has brought down so many venerable banks in the past few weeks (TRUTH!) and that he voted for Bush's policies 95% of the time (TRUTH!) even though now he seems to be suddenly distancing himself from perhaps the most unpopular and inept President in history, maybe because he's begun to realize that Obama's made crucial inroads to independent voters who have long supporter McCain's so-called "maverick" streak. So this inter-office Presidential rivalry will continue for a few more weeks until we know the outcome of the November election....and depending on which way the dice fall, some of us are either going to be elated on November 5th or cursing 4 more years of failed Bush policies, making at least the departmental Republicans (of which there are a surprising amount for a library) happy, but just wait until the economy sours again. Today the Dow Jones surged 936 points on the news that the Feds are going to, in part, nationalize some of the banks and inject an immediate (LARGE) amount of money into them to restart the frozen credit markets, and that surge may continue and there may well be a full recovery of everything that was lost these past few weeks, but who's to say how long that's going to last? Only time will tell...........