You don’t know what you’ve got ’til newspapers are gone

Richard Cohen, the veteran Washington Post columnist, once wrote, “Every journalist’s life is a walk through newspaper graveyards. The big dailies are the dinosaurs of our era. They thrived once. Their publishers smoked big cigars and their editors got the best tables in restaurants and the papers hit the front porch hard and heavy with ads.

Kids delivered them and adults worked for them and old men drew their pensions from them. They were a way of life, monuments in newsprint, but the way of life changed and the papers got weak and then sick and then died.”

Cohen wrote this as a lament when Washington’s Star newspaper died. Take note that he wrote it in 1981. America’s newspapers have been twitching and convulsing and dying for a long time.

Attribution:MICHAEL OLESKER baltimorepostexaminer.com
Full Story: Gone