Black and white and dead all over

Michael Kinsley has a funny, and perceptive, column in The Washington Post detailing better than I've seen it done anywhere else, how and why the newspaper industry is in such trouble. I've often considered the papers out-of-date, but I've never really given thought to how hopelessly pre-technology the entire industry is. Let Kinsley detail how your paper gets to your front door:

Somewhere in the forest, a tree is cut down. It is loaded onto a giant truck and hauled a vast distance to a factory, where the trees [are] turned into huge rolls of paper. These rolls are loaded onto another truck and hauled another vast distance to another factory, where they are covered in ink, chopped up, folded, stacked, tied and loaded onto a third set of trucks, which fan out across cities and regions dropping bundles here and there.

Printing plants no longer have the clickety-clack of linotype machines and bubbling vats of molten lead. The letterpress machines that stamped the ink on the paper have been supplanted by offset presses that transfer it gently. There is computer-controlled this and that. Nevertheless, the process remains highly physical, mechanical, complicated and noisy. As we live through the second industrial revolution, your daily newspaper remains a tribute to the wonders of the first one.

Meanwhile, back to those bundles. Some of them are opened and the newspapers are put, one by one, into plastic bags. Bagged or unbagged, they are loaded onto a fourth set of vehicles -- bicycles by legend; usually, these days, a car or small truck -- and flung individually into your bushes or at your cat. Other bundles go to retail establishments. Still other newspapers are locked into attractive metal boxes bolted into the sidewalk. Anyone who is feeling lucky and happens to possess exact change has a decent shot at obtaining a paper or, for the same price, carting away a dozen.

I'd like to go on quoting, because it's all good, but I might get into copyright trouble, so I suggest you follow the link and read it at WaPo's site. They need the readers.