News Wh... er, Hound

I have a new job, in Jersey City. I take the train to it. This is the perfect opportunity to read the morning paper, and when I am done with the paper I put it in the recycling bin at Hoboken Station. So much less paper to bundle up on recycling day--great!

Unfortunately, it only takes me about half the train ride to read the Star-Ledger. So now I am a news who... er, hound.

When I board the train, I scan the seats for commuters with large stacks of riffled newspapers beside them. I'm picky--I want the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, not the Star-Ledger or the Daily News. "Oh, is this your paper?" I ask my seatmate.

"Sure, you can read it."

The Star-Ledger costs about 1/4 the price of the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, so I don't expect as much. I know that the Ledger is having financial problems. They recently cut out Diesel Sweeties (don't miss it) and Miss Manners (do). What I don't get is why their national and international coverage is so much less readable than the Times's or the Journal's. I read for days about Russia's incursion into Ossetia before I thought I understood what was going on. (And for the record, I majored in economics and political science.)

Where the Star-Ledger excels is in covering New Jersey. Makes sense. Maybe the editors think that anyone really interested in life outside New Jersey will also read the bigger papers? But yesterday two of the big front page articles were about parks in western New Jersey, and the death of a Perth Amboy police officer. I had to go to page four to learn that President Bush and Nouri Al-Maliki were discussing a pullout of US troops from Iraq by 2011.

Now maybe the insignificant position of the article and the analysis were the editors' way of pointing out that whatever President Bush negotiates, our new president will likely renegotiate it in 2009. That's fine. But then shouldn't the editors say so on the op-ed page?

I'll keep looking for answers. Sometimes you may find me bereft of reading material, with the other gold-diggers at the recycling bin outside track 17.