April Fool's News

We’re in the process of deciding what paper to read in the morning. The local papers are no longer dailies; they still appear every day but daily delivery only takes place a few days a week; these days are selected to coincide with shopping days in the run up to which advertisers need assurance. The two papers (Detroit News and Free Press) merge, as it were, into a single Sunday edition. My scans (using HP) and their collage (using Picasa), shown here, tells you what met my eyes today, April Fool’s Day. (My mention of two brands above will surely be followed by checks in the mail...?)

We are so used to this sort of thing now, it’s difficult even to remember the sober black-and-white papers of the 1950s, when we arrived, with at best one photograph, sometimes not. The paper we read then was the Kansas City Star. This Sunday issue actually has an internal section intended for the grownups titled News+Views; but the front page is meant to appeal to an imaginary subhuman mass out there I’d call the Yahoos, but I doubt that many now associate that word with Gulliver’s travels any more.

The plan is to abandon this paper and also the daily New York Times; that paper is at least trending in this direction more and more. We think we’ll settle for the Sunday New York Times and, the rest of the week, for the Wall Street Journal. In that process we shall save ourselves a lot of money—necessary because we need it to fill the doughnut hole our Congress has graciously provided to decorate our pharmaceuticals coverage.