News of the News

What is the future of the Newspaper business? It doesn’t look good.

Until a two years ago I spent no less than an hour a day reading the Duluth News Tribune. I began reading papers when I was in Debate as a high school sophmore and have been reading them daily ever since. Jefferson’s old quote has always appealed to me and it showed up the other day in the Trib although incompletely:

Jefferson regarded the uncensored dissemination of ideas more important to freedom than government which he always spoke about as more of a dangerous necessity that should be cut back periodically before it impinged on the freedom he valued more highly. Nice sentiments for a slave owner.

“The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.” — Thomas Jefferson

I considered boycotting the Trib once but as an old editor of the Trib told me where will we get local information without it? For better or worse the Duluth News Tribune is the only source for information we’ve got that

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