Notes on newspapers

I bought both the local paper and the Mpls. paper today. Only the local paper had any coverage of the death of Senator Kennedy. Considering the timing, that seems understandable.

But further examination of the rags leads me to wonder two things:

1. It was certainly nice of the [Dispatch] Pioneer-Press to tell us all where to go to look for drag races on weekends. Those maps certainly were nice.

2. Neither paper gives a lot of thought or space to its opinion pages any more, yet they both have access to much material. Wouldn’t you think that they might want to avoid duplication unless there was something really good in what was being duplicated? Yet today’s Star[-Journal and] Tribune ran a Kagan piece that the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq are not “wars of choice” that the DPP had run Tuesday. Don’t the folks at the Mpls. paper read the DPP? There did not seem to be that much compelling and distinctive content to the piece.