Kathryn asks where my Sunday edition of “top stories” is. Here’s how I answered:
Taking a day off. There’s not enough news for a decent front page by my standards. If I owned a newspaper, and it took a day of the week off, it would be Sunday. I generally ignore the Sunday paper myself, since it’s all make-work gotta-fill-the-Sunday-paper stuff. Almost no news.
I realize I’m not typical.
Apart from the fact that I don’t like working on Sundays, there’s just a dearth of news. For most newspapers, it’s their biggest seller of the week. I’ve always wondered why, because I’m a newshound, and it’s almost always the least newsy paper of the week. To each his own, I guess.
Mind you, I’m not saying there’s no news anywhere. We have this out of Israel, for instance. And the situation in Iran certainly bears watching. But there’s not enough for a full, rounded front page by my standards. And I don’t feel like straining at it.
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If there is any doubt that this is a slow news day you look at the State’s top story. Large type proclaiming that summer camps are not regulated.
The Sunday paper was the most popular for a number of reasons: ads & coupons, expanded comics and features such as travel, arts and literature, travel and business. All of that seems to be less than it once was. The Sunday paper is now skinnier and more expensive. I picked one up when I ordered dinner today and had finished everything of interest before my meal arrived. Sad.
Theoretically, it’s also the day when people have time to read more. That never worked for me; the last thing I want to do on my day of rest is read the paper, which to an old newspaperman smells suspiciously like WORK.
Interestingly, we find online that readership is FAR higher on workdays, which ought to suggest a new paradigm…
I love it! Just picked up a novel I read years ago and leafed through it, and ran into this support of my point about Sunday papers:
That’s from Spy Hook by Len Deighton, the fourth novel in the nine-volume Bernard Samson series.
Sunday papers are all about Saturday, news-wise. The rest of the paper is mulling things over, which is a lost art these days.
Online reading would be less b/c folks who don’t live with laptops affixed to their bodies (as I do) aren’t sitting at their desks multi-shirking.