newspaper

Newspaper & Comic Fashion Umbrella
$16.99
Dramatic and eye-catching designs Matching Nylon cases, heavy-duty construction. Newspaper and Comic graphics turn heads and create a buzz. Our exclusive designs are in stock and ready to go.

The Washington Post
$0.01
I'm a big fan of the Post's content. It's a nice break from Fox, AM radio, and MSNBC--reading this paper every day will probably make you smarter, not just louder.

That said, the people who run the company seem to really hate this whole new-fangled electronic news thing. Reading the Post on Kindle is better than reading it on their atrocious website, but any article that has special formatting is often missing content. This seems to happen most in the Sunday magazine. One article last week was missing all of its internal headers. It was a set of questions and answers, and all the questions were missing! Similarly, the little table in Date Lab which describes the couple's characteristics wasn't included at all. And one thing that pervades both the website and the Kindle text is primitive typography. Quote marks aren't curled, and em dashes are just two hyphens. (Notably, the NYT gets this right on their web, iPhone, and Kindle editions.)

Long story short: we're paying $10/month to get what's on the website for free. The least they could do is give us curly quotes and non-broken articles.

-30-: The Collapse of the Great American Newspaper
$26.00
This book was a disappointment. It suffers from the failings of a collection of short articles written for different purposes by different authors. There is a good deal of repetition and many of the analyses are superficial. The LA Times / Chicago Tribune fiasco is treated in detail but I didn't learn a lot I hadn't seen in press coverage of the acquisition and its sequelae.

The notable exception is the superb essay from 1995 by Elizabeth M. Neiva. She discusses how the introduction of photocomposition reduced the production costs for newspapers and resulted in significantly increased profits. Then the IRS began appraising family owned newspapers on what a potential buyer might pay for the paper rather than book value. The heirs of many publishers found they could not pay the inheritance taxes and sold the papers to publicly held firms. This essay is currently available on the web.

In an industry with declining revenues the only response to Wall Street's pressure for "growth" for a publicly held firm has been to cut costs year after year.

The treatment of possible solutions to our current problems was not convincing. I would like to have read about nonprofit journalism models such as the Poynter Institute's St. Petersburg Times and the new ProPublica project.

Art Newspaper - International Edition
$99.00
I am an art lover and this product has it all! It reports on everything that's happening in the art scene all over the world. There are updates on art stolen during World War II and how the rightful owners are trying to get it back. It shows restoration projects on famous paintings with new discoveries about the works being made during the process. This is one meaty paper with even the advertisements being interesting and full of art. It will take me an entire month just to read it all! It is worth every penny. The articles are written and printed in such a way that it's all on one page in a reader-friendly length. This is one highly recommended source for all things art!