Support Your Local Newspaper

For years The Post has had an ad campaign built around the slogan: If You Don't Get It, You Don't Get It. It always sounded to me a little mocking and in-your-face, but maybe I just don't get it. What's certain is that a lot of people have decided that, when it comes to subscribing to a newspaper, not-getting-it is a perfectly viable option, especially since they can now get it for free online.

But the "it" will shrink. Scores of talented journalists are walking out the door this week, taking the early buyout.

Among the many I'll miss is Peter Carlson, who, in addition to being a wonderful fellow, has always been constitutionally incapable of writing a dull story. His last magazine column ran today.

One paragraph gave me a twinge of guilt: He talks of the best magazines in the business, and several of them are now piling up, unread, in my living room. I loved that Michael Kinsley essay in The New Yorker, but did I ever see it in print? No, just online.

I'm getting worried that the only place people read print anymore is at the beach, on their back porch if the skeeters aren't out yet, and airplanes.

Howie had a fine column yesterday about the Post buyouts, and toward the end sounded a note -- we get the media we deserve -- too seldom heard in the discussion about the future of print:

' The ticking time bomb here is the wholesale abandonment of newspapers by younger people who grew up with a point-and-click mentality. When I was speaking at Harvard recently, a smug graduate student said, "I get everything I need from YouTube. What are you going to do about it?"

' "What are you going to do about it?" I shot back. If people want to tune out the news, no one can compel them to change their habits. We can be smarter, faster and jazzier in providing information, but we can't force-feed the stuff. If newspapers wither and die, it will be in part because the next generation blew us off in favor of Xbox and Wii and full-length movies on their iPods. Network news faces the same erosion. Maybe, in the end, we get the media we deserve.'

(Question: How do you get everything you need from YouTube? Do people not read anymore?)

(Another question: Who is actually making money these days? Google, for sure. But note how the Google News page is basically a bunch of newspaper and wire stories. Someone's gotta do the original reporting.)

In South Australia a couple of weeks ago I met a paleontologist who subscribes to The New York Review of Books. It was kind of reassuring to know that the venerable intellectual publication has a global reach.

But he said he's thinking of letting his subscription lapse. Doesn't have time to read it.

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