Last week was National Newspaper Week. In past years newspapers have printed blank front pages as a statement of what the world would be like without newspapers. We didn’t have room for that last week. (That’s a good thing.)
Newspapers today compete for attention with magazines, radio, television and (probably most of all) the internet. For almost a century (since the invention of the radio) people have been insisting “print is dead.” And yet print remains.
Perhaps one of the best explanations for the tenacity of print journalism came from British comedian John Oliver in a very not-safe-for-work video in which he pointed out a simple fact: almost every article you read online, every news story you see on television or hear on the radio, references back to a newspaper article (and the ones that don’t are very likely fake news). Newspapers, old-school as they may be, are the living roots of the free press, or, as Oliver put it, the bottom of the food chain: “The media is a food chain which would fall apart without local newspapers.”
I took my life in my hands and crossed Market Street on foot this week. Without crosswalks—and maybe some kind of pedestrian awareness signage—crossing Market Street (aka Hwy. 13) is as good as bungee-jumping for an adrenaline rush.
I would love to see actual crosswalks installed on Market Street. A stoplight would be great, but that seems a bit farfetched considering current traffic patterns (my fiction editors would call it “contrived”), so maybe just some traffic tranquilizers, or whatever CDOT is calling them these days.