I miss my newspaper.

Neither the New York Times, nor it's international brethren, the International Herald Tribune, are to be found in Sydney. I had figured that the preeminent newspaper from the preeminent country in the world could be found in at least one newsstand in this, the financial capital of Australia. Nope. You can get Le Monde, but not IHT. At first I thought that I was just going to the wrong newsstands, but I eventually ended up talking to the distributer, who put to rest any such hopes. Two years ago, the IHT decided to pull out of non-essential areas, Australia being one of these targeted areas. Sigh, I had hopes that if any newspaper company could resist the shrinking paper syndrome, it would be the Times Company, yet here I am with no good broadsheet down here for me to read.

What may you ask is the shrinking paper syndrome? It is this misguided idea that making the paper smaller will attract more readers. I maintain my stance that less people are reading papers because there is less in them to read. The trend in newspapers is to have smaller and smaller stories, so that the paper can be smaller and more narrow. In any other medium this would be seen as suicide. If a 24-hour cable news show was struggling, would it cut back to 21-hours of coverage? Would a lagging news website post fewer, smaller stories? Come on now media-owner folks, what the heck are you thinking as you follow this business model? If you are not going to throw your cards in, perhaps it is time to hit the drawing board again.

Alas, no matter how much I complain, the only quality paper I'm going to be reading down here is of the dot com variety. And it just ain't the same.