The New York Times announced a couple of days ago that it would print a narrower paper, cutting the width of it pages by an inch and a half to meet the national standard of page width. I would be exaggerating if I said my world went into a tail spin, but I did feel let down and despirited for a good while. I have read the New York Times religiously every single morning for years and years, from my very first years in graduate school, and enjoyed its expansive girth in comparison to the Wall Street Journal. And I never read the Wall Street Journal except furtively at "work work" ("work work" is my term for work in corporate America, while just "work" is everything else), and that too for a total of, oh, about 20 times.
And now the New York Times will be the same width as the Wall Street Journal? That, more than anything else, is a cruel comedown. They say the content will be the same. I am assuming this means the paper will have more pages. Or, even tighter editing than ever? Or, links to online continuations of stories. Reducing the width of my paper is like squishing my wide screen TV into a square. But don't worry, the content will be the same.
Even before the impending great narrowing I have fantasized about unsubscribing. Every day I open the Times and come face to face with stories that disappoint, alarm, sadden. It ruins my day, starting with difficulty swallowing my breakfast toast. Every disaster story (a collapsed bridge, in ultra-modern America?), every new death in a awful, strange war, every shameful story of abuse, scandal, corruption - why, why, why?
An emigrant leaves his country of origin to go to a better place. And when you emigrate to America as a young man just out of his teens, you know you are going to the perfect place, God's own country. And then the same things that would have hardly merited a second look in the place you left behind take on mythical proportions in paradise. (And I am not talking about the National Enquirer, at least not yet!) Corruption in America? How can that be? Incompetent politicians in the US? You've got to be kidding. A thousand little cuts.
I have no plans to unsubscribe to the New York Times yet, but a true constant of my life as an immigrant (look at all the world news!!) has changed, and that makes me unsure about my future relationship with the Times. When I open up the Times it won't drape over my kitchen table any more. It will come up short. It will have lost its edge.
My life as an immigrant, observations from the margins, the role of astrology in my search for an identity, the tension between my scientific and mystical sides, and fantasies of an itinerant life.
1 comment:
As a journalist, I find the saddest aspect of the downsized New York Times to be the shrunken Letters to the Editor page. It seems we are losing more and more of our civic outlets and this is just another example of democracy in decline. Yes, we can read more letters online, as the print version of the Times tells us. But it's just not the same, somehow. Looking at an op-ed page with so few letters on it makes the vital back-and-forth between the newspaper and its readership seem less vital.
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