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The ecologically minded public would be assured that Canada is not running out of trees.
I’ve kept this idea in the back of my head with the other detritus because crises spawn hallucinations, and the newspaper business seems to be in end-stage crisis. The company that owns the Tribune is in bankruptcy. The company that owns the Reader is in bankruptcy. We laid off a few people last week. There’s word that the Tribune will lay off far more in January.
And neither will the TriCity News of Monmouth County, New Jersey. Its an alternative weekly “focusing on the arts, culture and politics,” and its entire staff consists of three full-time and one half-time workers. But the News warranted a column by media writer David Carr in Monday’s New York Times because it’s prosperous. How? Why? “Precisely because it aggressively ignores the Web,” Carr tells us. Owner/publisher Dan Jacobson told Carr, “Why would I put anything on the Web? I don’t understand how putting content on the Web would do anything but help destroy our paper. Why should we give our readers any incentive whatsoever to not look at our content along with our advertisements, a large number of which are beautiful and cheap full-page ads?”
