You should have suspected that something important was being bumped when they started running Wishing Well and Jumble on the front page. But aren’t all newspapers playing up features to compete with TV? A few weeks later, you can’t remember either of your state’s senators. You’re living in a soft-news fantasy world—a world where nothing that happens in Washington or Beijing is ever more important than local high school basketball. A world called Knight-Ridder, Gannett, or Newhouse. Everyone said it couldn’t happen in your town—until the day the capitalists took over the newspapers.
Soon there’s a new managing editor—and a new slant to the lead photo captions (“The weatherman says fall doesn’t arrive till 2:09 P.M. Friday, but try telling that to these little pixies … the Molenar quads of 2491 Euclid Avenue.”) There’s an increased emphasis on TV listings, Erma Bombeck, and 4-H news (each in a separate four-color pullout). Then one day you wake up and realize you’re reading the kind of newspaper that gets excerpted at the bottom of columns in The New Yorker. Rest assured—obscene though your paper’s return on investment may be, it is never too late to find out what is really going on. With today’s media, you have to read between the lines.