It’s gotten so I can sense the question coming ahead of time. Friends drop their voices into a particular register, a low, sympathetic tone, and ask, “So how are things at the paper these days, anyway?”
It’s the same tone people use to ask about a relative with a terminal diagnosis.
I appreciate their concern. And it’s understandable, given the incessant hand-wringing over the fate of newspapers, especially here in the shadow of The Boston Globe.
My standard response is realistic yet modestly upbeat, touching on long-term trends and the immediate economic challenges. Depending on their level of interest, I sometimes veer off into general civic awareness and the implications for governance, and I may drop in a few statistical nuggets from our most-recent readership survey. If I’m feeling more combative, I may compare the situation of newspapers with that of broadcast TV, radio or magazines.
But what I really want to do is pull out a fake British accent and act out the great Monty Python skit:
Of course, that doesn’t end so well, does it?
In my next few posts I’ll tackle various aspects of The Big Question: “What is the future of printed daily newspapers?”
First up: Rampant conflation…
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