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.