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Yesterday's News

It is my morning ritual to settle into the couch with a cup of coffee and a copy of the nearest big city newspaper, the Lexington Herald-Leader. It's a McClatchy property, now, but Lexington isn't all that big a place and we live about 75 minutes from where the paper is printed. Which means ours is the first edition, and the sports scores are incomplete. Which means a quick glance at CNN or The New York Times online is probably more comprehensive in the morning. But I like tangible things, y'know, and I like sitting reading a newspaper over my coffee.

So I read the whole thing this morning, including two nice obituaries for George Carlin (one of them even front page). Only, later, when I looked to see whether it might rain on our garden, did I notice that it was Tuesday's newspaper. And today is Wednesday.

What with open windows and singing birds and a five-year-old who seems to wish to eschew sleeping at all costs, we wake early here. And it's not uncommon for me to beat the delivery person to the box where the newspaper rests.

So after breakfast I walked back down the driveway, and there was today's newspaper.

I wondered, as I walked, as fuel prices and -- I presume -- coming fuel shortages change how we live, I wondered just how many more years the Herald-Leader will deem our little market at the edge of their readership worth serving.

And whether I will miss it when it's gone.

Our local paper is, of course, dreadful. And the meme is now well circulated that newsprint is dead, the internet can do that job better. And maybe it can. Maybe.

Until I spill coffee on the keyboard, anyhow.

Posted by grant on June 25, 2008 8:16 AM | Permalink

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