Welcome to Buster's Blog

Irregular commentary on whatever's on my mind -- politics, sports, current events, and life in general. After twenty years of writing business and community newsletters, fifteen years of fantasy baseball newsletters, and two years of email "columns", this is, I suppose, the inevitable result: the awful conceit that someone might actually care to read what I have to say. Posts may be added often, rarely, or never again. As always, my mood and motivation are unpredictable.

Buster Gammons















Sunday, January 24, 2016

The Columbus Dispatch: Not Quite Dead Yet; It Just Smells Like it


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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