7-Point Plan To Save Newspapers

Michael Kinsley, the editorial chief at the LATimes I love to hate, is a pretty funny guy. In his Washington Post column today, he laments the soon-to-be-tragic end of the American newspaper:

And what could be more common-sense -- more downright American -- than chopping down vast swaths of trees, loading them onto trucks, driving the trucks to paper mills where the trees are ground into paste and reconstituted as huge rolls of newsprint, which are put back onto trucks and carted across the country to printing plants where they are turned into newspapers as we know them (with sections folded into one another -- or not -- according to a secret formula designed for maximum mess and frustration and known only to a few artisans) and then piling these finished newspapers into a third set of trucks that fan out before dawn across every metropolitan area dropping piles here and there, so that a network of newspaper deliverers can transfer them to smaller trucks or cars and go house to house hiding newspapers in the bushes or throwing them at the cat, and patriotic citizens can ultimately glance at the front page, take Sports to the john, tear out the crossword puzzle and throw the rest away?

Kinsley establishes a lucid seven-point plan of government support and court intervention that is hillarious, especially since it comes from a man who's lampooning his own support of such solutions in the real world. Here's one of his points:

Point two: We must establish a Strategic Newspaper Reserve to reduce the nation's dangerous dependence on foreign news. At a time when brides in this very country are fleeing their marriages on buses and pretending to be kidnapped, it is nothing short of scandalous that so much ink is being spilled about some war in distant Iraq.

Read the whole thing here.