Papers, still

Former Victorian David Crisp, who runs a little rag up in Montana, is one of my favorite bloggers. He has some cogent points about the direction of the newspaper business:

Just in the last six years, the number of full-time reporters working in the nation’s state capitols has fallen 32 percent. Since 1980, the number of full-time political cartoonists has fallen from 280 to fewer than 90. The government keeps getting bigger, and the number of people paid to keep an eye on it keeps getting smaller.
Democracy doesn’t flow from Washington, D.C. It flows to Washington from thousands of local communities, electing representatives to take their concerns to the Capitol from thousands of cities and school districts, counties and PTAs. For a couple of centuries, those concerns have been reflected in and reported by hundreds of local and regional newspapers.

Read it all here. It is seven or eight posts down. He is right; the death of the local paper is a catastrophe for people who want to know what is going on in their communities.
We got another chapter in the Fatal Funnel series in the Vicad. The big illustration was a pic of the number plate on the door of the motel where some plotting took place. Sure made it all clear to me …