When the Newseum opened in D.C. I thought it a strange and somewhat unnecessary institution. But as newspapers around the country started to fold, I saw its point. Now the Newseum is closing.
On Facebook yesterday Spud Hilton, the recently retired travel editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, posted the news that the paper was discontinuing its Travel section.
Travel writing flourishes in the Bay Area as nowhere else in the United States, and the Chronicle Travel section was both a reflection of and a contributor to that phenomenon. If you were a travel writer, one of the highlights of any visit to San Francisco was picking up the Chronicle and reading the Travel section. Imagining the paper without a Travel section is like picturing the city without cable cars.
On page 3 of yesterday’s New York Times, under the heading “Of Interest: Noteworthy Facts from Today’s Paper,” readers learned: “There were 17,000 varieties of American apple by 1905.” On page 11 of the Book Review, a reviewer noted: “we don’t really need to know that there were 17,000 varieties of American apple by 1905.”
Sunday the New York Times Magazine ran a story on Rick Steves that began with illustrations of the famous travel writer’s unfamiliarity with New York City. It was a lede that the author clearly found ironic while I, and perhaps other readers beyond the five boroughs, saw it as parochial.
For my first 19 years in Florida I didn’t subscribe to any newspaper. I worked for one. Monday through Friday I’d pick up a copy in the newsroom and on Sunday I’d go to Bob’s and shell out a dollar. Things written about in Saturday’s paper, as far as I was concerned, never happened.
In 2008, the Sun-Sentinel laid me off and I immediately took out a subscription to the Herald. I don’t remember what it cost then, but now it's $89 a month. For much less than that I can go to Bob’s and buy the weekly Spectator which, being British, has an irreverent flair that long ago disappeared from American journalism. But it doesn’t tell me what’s happening in Wynwood.
I suspect that the exorbitant subscription price is part of the paper’s effort to wean readers off the print edition so the company can eventually kill it. I don’t like reading online because I spend most of my day staring into a screen. Yet I grasp the absurdity, in the age of the Internet, of gathering news and information, waiting 24 hours to print it on paper, and then delivering thousands of these papers to individual houses and apartments.
It’s just that sometimes I like absurdity. But not at $89 a month.
Reading the New York Times yesterday and coming across the essay titled, “Admit It. Summer’s terrible,” I thought: And people beyond the Hudson think this is the cheerless newspaper of a dyspeptic city.