Monday, May 18, 2009

Swine flu and local news

NY1 is reporting the city's first swine flu death this morning - an assistant principal of a school in Queens. Last week NY1 aired an interview with his wife -- this was just after he'd been hospitalized -- in which she was critical of the city for not closing the school any sooner. Bloomberg said something defensive, along the lines of "we can't just go around closing schools willy nilly, children need to be educated, etc." Sounds like a weaker argument now in light of the death. This will be an interesting story to watch.

In other news, I was saddened and quite upset yesterday to read that the New York Times' City section will cease publishing from now on. They're going to wrap it up into another section, which will be less City-centric and will encompass more of the metro area and the suburbs. SCREW the suburbs. I want my City section! The reason I read that section, and the reason I obsessively watch NY1 (hence the theme of this seemingly unrelated diatribe) is because I crave LOCAL news. I obviously care about the world at large, but I have numerous outlets to choose from for national and world news. Also, I view this as a sad commentary on the state of newspaper publishing in general, but that's a rant for another time (and one I believe I've subjected you all to before, anyway). So yeah, the homogenization of news continues... soon USA Today will be the only paper Pat is able to refer to in In The Papers.

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