No more news(papers)?

The Sydney Morning Herald publishes its last broadsheet edition today. As someone who felt that taking advertisements off the front page of The Times was a sufficient shock for one lifetime I don’t really approve of the way all the papers have gone tabloid – somehow it seems to diminish their dependability - though I dare say this is illusion; somehow the Guardian simply being the same shape and size as the Mirror is unsettling. But I guess newspapers are on the way out anyway, or statistic suggest it (a new weekly is nevertheless about to be published in Australia). I take the SMH from Friday to Monday, and find this quite enough reading to do outside ‘normal’ reading pattern – and it’s surprising how many articles I drop after the first two or three paragraphs. A lot of the writing doesn’t, frankly, seem very good – and good news services on TV (here, notably, the BBC World News and the ABC news) seem to fill the bill as far as actual news is concerned, while a good many on-screen commentators are excellent. The only thing one will really miss about newspapers, sadly - being hard-nosed about it - are the commentaries and critics (not nearly enough time given to the arts on TV nets and current affairs programmes).