They wouldn’t print it if it wasn’t true
Here’s the scenario. Imagine that your grocery store has two floors. If you live in New York City this will be easier for you, but work with me here. And that the elevator is kind of old and creaky and slow and the button is hidden behind a display but it doesn’t really matter because the unit is in constant usage and thus you can rely on people inside pressing the buttons and ensuring its arrival. Once inside, people fit themselves in like a Tetris game for the 20 second ride. Usually, I just take the stairs (I can’t imagine maneuvering a cart around this narrow-aisled, super-crowded place) but either way, it’s no big deal.
Can you imagine a less interesting blog post that what I’ve just described in the last paragraph? And yet The New York Times, the newspaper of record, the staid Gray Lady, put that on the front page on Saturday. I have a weird relationship with the print media industry. That is, I see it the way the rest of you see the music industry. I subscribed to the daily NYT from my first year of college (my family were subscribers so I suppose you could say I’ve read it since I could read) through 2007. That’s when I realized I read so many news blogs and online papers that all I ended up doing with the physical paper was throwing it in the recycling bin. I still get the weekend Times (I’m thinking of stopping, though), thus me seeing this on the front page. Like your relationship with my own dying industry, I not only feel like I can get what they sell for free on the Interweb but now I’m beginning to feel it’s mostly crap anyway.
An article about my grocery store’s elevator? Really?
A Slow New York Passage, Up to Organic Food
Title comes from:
Joe Jackson – Sunday Papers