For those pondering the future of the press, a dispatch from George Plank, a theatre specialist at West Point (and long ago a student of mine in a writing course at Camp Zama, in Japan):
At a supermarket in a town about 10 minutes north of USMA, I picked up a copy of today's NYTimes along with a couple of other items. The checkout clerk was a young girl, a teenager I guess. The paper had, I think, four sections today. To prepare it for scanning, she separated the four sections. She found the bar-code on the first page and scanned the first section. There was a beep, and a price was recorded. She then began to look for a bar-code on the second section.
I was puzzled, but then realized that she probably was used to scanning tabloids with only one section. I said to her, "It's all one paper." She said, "It is?" I said, "It's the New York Times." She said, "Oh."
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James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and has written for the magazine since the late 1970s. He has reported extensively from outside the United States and once worked as President Carter's chief speechwriter. He and his wife, Deborah Fallows, are the authors of the new book Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey Into the Heart of America, which has been a New York Times best-seller and is the basis of a forthcoming HBO documentary.