PressEthic

As the '06 midterms are conducted, a changing media landscape again comes into focus.

Lesson one: how inconvenient to print the news on paper!

As Jack Shafer writes:

The only newspaper with less genuine news than the Monday-before-the-election edition is the Tuesday-day-of-election edition, as we'll see in six or seven hours from now when the bulldog editions reach convenience stores and hawkers outside of bars. Nothing will have changed between Sunday night, when the Monday paper went to bed, and Monday night, when Tuesday's got tucked in. But across the country, tens of thousands of column inches will be sacrificed by talented, exhausted writers pumping nothingness out of the void and calling it news.

So, if this column reaches you in time, save yourself some pain and cash and don't buy the Tuesday newspaper. If you subscribe, do yourself a favor—tear out the first half of the A section and discard it. If you can purge your paper of its editorial section without looking at it, do so, and go directly to the sports section, which unlike the style, metro, and business sections, will make no attempt to talk politics.

Instead of buying a newspaper Tuesday and Wednesday, I'll be checking the latest polls at Real Clear Politics, reading Mystery Pollster for analysis and perhaps even turning on CNN.

On Wednesday, I'll return to print for my political news diet -- newspapers are able to do good analysis even a day after the fact. If I ran a metropolitan daily, I'd resign myself to the same realities, and run far fewer political stories than most daily newspapers will.