Last night, once again, I heard a lot of sirens. A single siren isn't unusual, because people will come by here headed for the ER, or the paramedics will be going o someone's house. Not newsworthy. A lot of sirens, though, that means there is some kind of event involving more than one emergency vehicle. I haven't seen anything this morning that would explain what the noise was all about. Remember when the papers would carry stories of local events in a timely fashion? The papers aren't dying because of the internet, because you can't get reliable, factual coverage of news any faster on the web than they used to bring it to you in the papers in the old days. They did this to themselves out of cheapness and greediness, I think. Sometime, just for fun, look at an issue of the Gazette back when it was the Schenectady Gazette. They carried all the local news, all of it. They made the switch to canned articles and lots of white space well before anyone had a computer for home use. Maybe if they tried bring us the news, they would have more subscribers and thus more advertisers. The local television news stations like to bring us live reports from somewhere where something newsworthy happened hours before. They always have a young reporter standing outside some closed government office. |