Returning from a week away, I discovered my local newspaper has been taken over by Junior Achievement. In a cost-cutting move, the Columbus Dispatch is now page-designed and assembled in Texas by Gatehouse Media, its new owner.
The "new-look" Dispatch appears to have been put together by independent teams of hallucinating ransom-note artists: multiple fonts, type sizes and column widths are used together on the same page, and all of it done with the extra-spacing and generous margins found in a typical 8th grade term paper. The result is a clash of lithographic styles which offends the eye.
Gatehouse Media specializes in weekly community newspapers and advertising circulars. It shows. The Dispatch now looks like a cross between the Clintonville Booster and a Krogers flyer.
The cheapening and dumbing-down of American media continues.
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