From my cold dead hands

I’m a subscriber to “Newsweek” the weekly news magazine which has been around for almost 80 years.  Well – I’m not really a subscriber – not anymore.

I was for several decades.  I liked the magazine’s coverage of national and international affairs and I liked its general unbiased approach to politics – – not like “Time” which had a conservative bent.

However, last year, the magazine was taken over by “The Daily Beast”.   It became a liberal-biased, anti-conservative publication.  When my subscription expired, I didn’t renew it.  I actually sent them an email and told them what they could do with their magazine.

But I kept on receiving it.  And, each week when I opened the pages I became more and more incensed.  I couldn’t believe a first class publication would publish such crap.

Then last week it was announced that “Newsweek” was ceasing publication and would became a digital only product.  I guess I wasn’t the only one who thought the magazine had become a pile of garbage.

I’m an avid reader of print publications.   I subscribe to at least a dozen magazines and read two newspapers every day.   I don’t like reading on-line because it just doesn’t have the right feel.

Unfortunately print publications are going the way of the Dodo and the Passenger Pigeon.   We don’t have to look any further than our own daily newspaper which has seen it subscriber base fall from 44,000 to just 21,000 in a few short years.

On-line media, like “Thurstontalk” now has more than 20,000 friends who access it on a daily basis.  It looks to me like print media is going away to a museum.

Yet, for millions of us, the feel of paper, the smell of the ink, the act of opening and turning pages, is engrained in our DNA.

We’ll never become digital junkies.  We’ll never worship at the altar of ones and zeros.  We’ll keep reading our print publications until you tear them from our cold dead hands.

But, if I’m going to continue to read printed material, it has to have some value.  It has to be good.

“Newsweek” wasn’t – anymore.  Now it’s all digital.  Maybe that’s where that type of junk should be – – on-line.