RoadsideOnline

Fifteen years later, I finally have an answer to a very good question. It begged a lot of thought, and I can only hope that the people who asked it will get to read this. But I doubt it.

Fifteen years ago, I found myself in the living room of a very lovely, retired couple chatting about their town. They lived in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and we all wondered aloud what would become of New England’s historic mill towns now that their manufacturing bases had withered away. Good fortune and good planning had spared Great Barrington. Its downtown still displayed considerable life, all the more amazing because it lacked an obvious catalyst. It had no single significant local attraction, major university nearby, or Fortune 500 headquarters.

Still, my hosts fretted about its future and what would continue to drive any kind of economic growth. This couple mentioned ongoing efforts to promote tourism in the town, for which I expressed my misgivings. “It’s rather sad to see these places resort to marketing itself as some kind of playground,” I said. To which my hosts responded, “But what else are you going to do?”

I suspect that if tomorrow I decided to cancel my newspaper subscriptions, I'd barely miss them after less then a week. Currently we subscribe to a full week of the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Sunday New York Times. A few weeks ago, the Inquirer in yet another cost cutting move, shunted its Sunday comics into the tabloid-sized TV listings. At a time when probably only aging baby boomers (such as myself, sadly) even read the comics, they've shrunk them still further.

Every year, the daily newspaper gives us yet one more reason to cancel the subscription. When I first moved to this area and subscribed, the Inquirer still had its Sunday magazine and a whole host of other features that made the paper something of joy to read. Its arts, business, and local sections bulged with content. The comic pages spread across eight pages.

Since then, the it killed the magazine, combined arts with business on Saturdays, killed the flimsy Image section that the magazine became, wiped out the local commentary page, shrunk its size and on and on and on.

Of course, the industry complains of dwindling readership and it must do what it can to protect its 25%(!) profit margins. Excuse me, but what did you nimrods do with all those profits you reaped even in a period of decline? Spend it on marketing yourself to new readers? Innovate on the internet? Invest in better content?

No, it all went to shareholders, apparently. It certainly didn't go into the product.

Ford is losing billions, and yet we don't see them installing wooden benches in their cars to replace those expensive plush bucket seats. Imagine a company that responds to a decline in sales by making its product LESS attractive to its customers. Well, friends, as a prime example of that idiocy, I give you the great American newspaper industry. May it rest in peace.

Last week, someone torched three 4,000-square-foot-plus McMansion-like “dream homes” in the Seattle area. Because of some placards left at the scene, the FBI suspects a group known as the Earth Liberation Front or ELF. In 2001, the FBI labeled the group as “eco-terrorists,” in an attempt—in our minds—to brand what are really just a bunch of vandal ideologues with the worst possible name.

For those who don’t know, the ELF is so loose knit, it hardly warrants description as an organization. The group seems to operate in small cells with little relation to each other except for their common dislike of sprawl and anything else they feels harms the environment. ELF barely exists at all except as a nebulous idea and an ideological banner under which completely independent activists can operate.