Throughout this trip I have made a point of buying and reading at least one local newspaper per day. This means that I have read, and enjoyed, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Denver Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle – all what Europeans would call the ‘quality press’ – but I have also read the Daily Times (Four Corners), theDaily Sentinel (Grand Junction), the Grand Junction Commentary, the Ouray County Plaindealer and the Arizona Daily Sun – what we would call the ‘local press’ – and the Navajo Times and the Ute Bulletin – reservation newspapers which simply have no equivalent – as well as the free press wherever it was available (including the likes of USA Today and the Wall Street Journal, which were frequently given for free in our hotels). My first observation, as illustrated by the analyses of the Aurora massacre, the economy and the Presidential campaign, is that comment and analysis, frequently erudite and always incisive, is alive and well – and not just in the big cities. (No coincidence, therefore, that Washington’s latest museum is the Newseum.) My second observation is that, though the press has clearly shrunk (in terms of numbers of titles) and retrenched (in terms of circulation figures), it is still very much there. Put another way, there are still significant numbers of Americans who are prepared to pay for a paper version of what they could probably read for nothing on the internet. My third observation is that there is no pan-American newspaper that everybody reads – and there clearly doesn’t have to be. Maybe that was the underlying conclusion to be drawn from the sorry experience of The European.
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