I crept back into town over the weekend, after a month in Texas. Here’s what awaited me: a pile of bills, a 32-day gap in my grasp of local affairs, and a shrunken News & Observer. I’ll take them in order (skipping the first, because bills are just bills).

I realized, not for the first time, that there’s a certain osmosis involved in local current events. Thanks to technology, you can keep up with the news from your hometown while traveling, but the information somehow lacks stickiness. It doesn’t seep in the way it does at home, instead feeling clinical and detached. The only thing I can recall from 32 days of long-distance trolling through the Web sites of WRAL and the N&O was an obituary for someone I knew.

The reason for that lack of absorption is that there’s a second level of information that isn’t, or can’t be, included in news reports — those little bits of context that are typically traded between individuals and help flesh out anyone’s understanding of events. When someone says politics are “in the air” in Washington, for instance, what they mean is that people there are talking about politics as well as reading about it. And that talking, as much as the reading, is what engages people with the news. Needless to say, nobody in Stephenville, Texas was chatting me up about Rielle Hunter’s appearance before a Raleigh grand jury. (OK, make that two local events I recall reading about.)

The day after I came home, I went out and bought the Sunday edition of the N&O. The Sunday paper has long since lost the heft of its glory days, but the page size has been maintained — until now. The new N&O is substantially smaller, a change editor John Drescher foreshadowed in June but which was a surprise nonetheless. I haven’t actually held the smaller edition in my hand yet (I’m an online reader almost exclusively these days), but it’s surely another reminder that the paper, like the whole industry, is a shadow of its former self. McClatchy, the N&O’s corporate parent, has stopped its financial hemorrhaging for the moment, but the cost-cutting apparently continues. Little wonder. McClatchy’s debt is not going anywhere.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 18th, 2009 at 3:33 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.