Are Newspapers Doomed?

A lot has been written lately about the decline in newspaper-readership and newspapers around the world cutting back on reporters and staff generally.

It would appear that many people now prefer to get their news via the net [hence the huge rise in the number of blogs] or tv. The latter, as we all know, is a wasteland - and anyone, for instance, relying on Fox News in the USA would barely get any news at all, and then what was provided would be slanted to fit the views of the Sun King Rupert Murdoch.

In an interesting article by Joseph Epstein in Commentary on his assessment of newspapers, he details his views on why, for example, the New York Times isn't such a great newspaper. Just about all of what he writes can be said about most other newspapers around the world. Life-style issues seem to be the go. Hard news is being relegated to a small proportion of the newspaper, if at all, as newspapers increasingly do away with their own reporters scattered across the globe. And who can forget those "embedded" so-called journalists at the beginning of the Iraq War? Independence was sacrified to being "part of the action" a-la a movie!

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Mahler's Prodigal Son

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