I have to admit I stopped buying and reading newspapers . . . Yes! A Detroit News reporter/journalist’s son! Well, I do read stories from several online news organizations and listen to the news on the radio. The problem is, what newspapers are still in print are garbage, most of them, and have been for years. I used to love Metro Detroit’s Oakland Press and so did dad. It was well laid out. The stories were insightful, unbiased and thoughtful. And . . . A big point for me . . . It was thin enough that you could start a story on the front page, flip to the rest of the story and flip back to the front page, again, without making a lot of noise, spilling your coffee or pulling your arms out of joint. The stories were placed in a logical order on each page so you could find them quickly, and there was some damn good reporting in the “rag” as dad and, I’m sure, his colleagues used to call newspapers.
The Oakland Press was bought by one of those huge conglomerates that made their real profits from those bulk junk-mail, advertisement papers that fill up our mailboxes. Then promptly run into the ground so it had no opportunity to try to keep up with the online news organizations. They hogtied the editors and writers so any sense of creativity was lost. Journalism gave way to advertising and ad sales became the bottom line rather than good writing. Is the Oakland Press still alive?
Pretty soon printed newspapers will be extinct. Gone the way of vinyl records . . . Wait! Newsflash! Vinyl is making a comeback. Revered by aficionados for the warm and fuzzy sounds caused by the physical properties of a grooved disk on a turntable with the sound embedded into the plastic grooves, transmitted to an amplifier by a needle gently placed by hand into the grooves, not to mention the awesome graphics that you can see and touch that have been reduced to the size of coasters. Vinyl is making a comeback! It’s reported that record companies are having trouble keeping up with demand and finding technicians familiar with vinyl printing techniques.
Could it be in our future that we will be hearing the ‘flap, flap, flap, crunch, crunch, crunch’ of paper news throughout Starbucks and Tim Horton’s? Well . . . I, myself enjoy the silence of my finger sliding across my tablet or Kindle to turn to the next “page”. My Kindle even simulates the look of paper curling as I swipe across it, I just discovered . . .
I hope you enjoy the story,
David T
“Dateline: Feb. 16 — A Slow News Day”
By Don Tschirhart
Excerpted from the unpublished book “It’s a Wonderful World: A Retired Reporter Looks At Life“
Go beyond front page
Page One was devoted to the National Hockey League contract talks, the $400 million to be spent on Metro Detroit roads, Metro Detroit population and jobs sprawl and a probe of pain killer drugs.
As usual I found the most interesting stories were on inside pages. For those who don’t get beyond the front page, I will summarize them:
- A Bakersfield, Calif., man is selling nine-inch-long spanking paddles for $6.50 each, described as “a faith-based way to discipline children . . . and train them as Christians.”
Paddling, the story said, has long been an accepted discipline method among some Christian groups. But mainline Christian groups, pediatricians and psychologists criticize the practice saying they are not justified in Scripture and hurt children mentally.
- The Hubble-space telescope may be getting old, but it keeps discovering new things making astronomers jump for joy.
The latest find was an icy-red object half the size of our Moon called Sedna, the most distant object in the solar system ever identified. While earth takes 365 days to travel around our sun, it takes Sedna 10,500 years in a highly elliptical (egg-shape) orbit that keeps it 7 to 93 billion miles away from Earth.
Astronomers are trying to see how Sedna fits into what they know about the origins of our solar system when the sun and its spinning disk of dust and gas emerged from a star cluster to spiral into space like a gigantic pin wheel that formed planets, including Earth.
The Hubble telescope has done it again. It is supposed to fall from the sky soon. It must be replaced with an even stronger telescope that will continue to probe the mysteries of this universe that we live in.
- The two-column headline said, “Multicultural TV ads avoid realities of race,” something I’ve known for years. Ads you see in TV are not what is happening in real life.
In the ads you see black, Latin, oriental and white adults and children socializing with one another. How wonderful this would be as our races could learn so much from each other.
In real life we know this isn’t the case. Most Americans overwhelmingly live and mingle with people from their own racial backgrounds. About 80 percent of whites live in neighborhoods in which more than 95 percent of their neighbors also are white, and most Americans have few close friends of another race.
- I have friends who don’t like coffee. But a recent study of more than 90,000 Japanese found people who drank coffee daily or nearly every day had half the risk of liver cancer of those who never drank coffee.
The study showed liver cancer was diagnosed in 547 cases per 100,000 non-coffee drinkers over 10 years, while for those who drank coffee the risk was 215 cases per 100,000.
Waitress! Bring me another cup of java.
- Northwest Airlines will stop free meals on all flight to save $20-$30 million a year.
Interesting, eh? On my most recent Northwest flights I only got a small bag of nuts to go with the beer that cost more than it does in a bar.
- One of my favorite columnists, Marney Rich Keenan, writes about how an internet chat room is a “sick support system” for teens, mostly girls, helping them with their anorexic and bulimic obsession.
Chatters tell how to fool doctors and dentists about their eating disorders and give a plethora of tips on purging more quietly, fasting advice, laxative use or pictures of waif-like models called “thinspirations.”
Keenan says it’s the equivalent of being pro-cancer or pro-leukemia; promoting the myth that eating disorders are a lifestyle choice when they are, in fact, a mental illness.
Ten million people in this country suffer from eating disorders, Keenan said. Eating disorders can be more powerfully addictive than drug dependencies.
What I can’t understand is what parents are looking at when they see how skinny their teen is getting, that their teen eats and runs to the bathroom or turns down the occasional roast beef-mashed-potato dinner.
If parents see obvious weight changes in their teens, run, don’t walk, to the nearest doctor.
Thank you, Marney Rich Keenan, for a very thoughtful and helpful column on an important issue of the day, one of the many interesting stories not on the front page.
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