Bleed, bleed

I was reading in the NYTimes the other day about more reductions in the number of newsroom employees at that paper. Fewer reporters, less news coverage.

The New York Times plans to eliminate 100 newsroom jobs — about 8 percent of the total — by year’s end, offering buyouts to union and nonunion employees, and resorting to layoffs if it cannot get enough people to leave voluntarily, the paper announced on Monday.

Read all that here. Then, when I went from that story to my Gmail, i found that a guy who sends me stuff had sent me a thing about TV stations running high-dollar obituaries in markets where newspapers have faltered. Read that here. Gonna be hard for the genealogists of the future to look up the ancestors on those clips. In a few years, the technology that records those deaths will be obsolete, unlike print, which stays current forever. Every day I note the large number of big death notices in the Vicad. The paper's management may be happily booking the big bucks from paid death notices [and some days the paid obits must compose a large part of the revenue, but the obits should be listed as liabilities, as all those old people gone are newspaper readers, irreplaceable in these post-literate – hell, illiterate – times.