October 2002 Archives

By Vincent F. Safuto staff writer

October 19, 2002

One of the billions of facts that emerged from the Sept. 11 attacks was one that seems odd in our electronic age: Newspapers experienced a brief bump in readership.

On the surface, it's puzzling. The World Wide Web has become an information source, and the latest news and pictures of the attacks appeared very quickly. But many people still turned to newspapers the next morning.

Some papers made "extra" afternoon editions on Sept. 11, while others (including the Press Journal) decided to gather news for a larger paper and a larger press run on Sept. 12.

Why, in this age of the Web, did people want a copy of not only the Press Journal but so many other papers?

The reason may be that, while the Web offers news quickly and cable-news channels can show events live, there's a permanence to the "hard copy." You can keep it to show to future generations.

Indeed, one of my childhood memories is seeing some of the newspapers from the days surrounding the assassination of JFK. Someone in my family saved them, and it was fascinating to see not only the news coverage and the many sidebars but also the advertisements and comic strips from a time when I was still a baby.

On my last visit to New York, one of my uncles, in going through part of his garage, found a paper bag containing newspapers from the day World War II ended in the Pacific. It was fascinating to read the stories of the celebrations that went on that day, and see the other, more mundane parts of the paper as well.

You can read about the Pacific war in countless history books and watch it on the History Channel, but those crumbling old newspapers had a lot of information that isn't normally available.

I'm sure someone somewhere was taping on his or her VCR the Sept. 11 coverage as it happened, and there's a Web site (www.archive.org) that's saving old Web pages and has an archive of news sites devoted to the Sept. 11 attacks.

But for years to come, I'm sure closets and attics will have newspapers from the day of the attacks and the days that followed.

Back when I started working on news Web sites, there was little thought to saving them for future reference. Maybe we were shortsighted or just too busy trying to learn how to use the new medium. But it never occurred to us to save those front pages of our sites, though we did save the pages linked to from the front.

Time has brought understanding, though, and many Web sites now save their old front pages. The Internet Archive is a fascinating look back at not only Sept. 11 but the early days of the Web, with many famous sites as they looked back in the mid-1990s.

Call me sentimental for the old ways, but while I use the Web for breaking news, a pile of newspapers still gets my vote as the best way to preserve history and historic events for future generations. It seems others feel that way, too.

Vincent F. Safuto is a copy editor for the Press Journal. Reach him at (Vincent.Safuto@scripps.com).


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By Vincent F. Safuto staff writer

September 30, 2002

Godzilla lives, and he's wearing a stethoscope.

He's not ravaging Tokyo this time. He's found a far richer pasture: the U.S. economy.

It's my theory, and my fear, that one day the medical industry will devour our nation's entire economy. A once-productive nation that produced all manner of goods and services will be reduced to one big industry: medical care. Everything else will be a statistical blip.

Maybe we should change the United States' name to the Medicated States of America.

The irony is that while almost all of our economic activity may someday center around medicine, most of the citizens will not have health insurance or be able to afford access to health care.

I hope I'm exaggerating, but annual double-digit hikes in insurance premiums are our destiny for the next few years and perhaps beyond. And the shrinking number of Americans who have employer-based health coverage will have to pay more and more of the cost for fewer services.

That is, unless their employers give up because of the enormous cost, and simply stop offering such coverage.

Even worse, I've read of companies that have had to lay off workers because of the high cost of medical coverage. So they hit the daily double, losing their job and their health coverage. Nice deal.

And they end up using the emergency room as their primary-care provider, which means that the hospital has to make up its costs by raising fees to those who have insurance.

I sometimes wonder if this may be the reason so many American corporations are closing their operations and moving to Canada or India, countries that have national health insurance.

Part of the problem is the cost of people to provide care. That's not a dig against medical professionals, who should be paid well. But it just doesn't compute that medical people are being paid more and more to treat fewer and fewer people.

Recent news stories tell of coming shortages in health-care professionals, and that's the one field of work in which you have a fighting chance at a decent wage, though it looks as though any wage advantage over McDonald's will be negated by the cost of your own health benefits.

Projections say that America in general and Florida in particular will need tens of thousands of nurses in the future, not only to staff hospitals but also to train new nurses to fill future needs.

The other problem is drugs. All those wonder drugs relentlessly advertised have corporations behind them, companies that want to recoup their investment in research and development. The one-two punch of the high cost of seeing a doctor plus exorbitant fees at the pharmacy will pauperize much of the nation.

Maybe, instead of provider of services, the best job of the future is that of health-care executive.

Thinking about health care in America can make you dizzy. But before you think, check your health-insurance policy to see if you're covered for dizziness.



Vincent F. Safuto is a copy editor for the Press Journal. Reach him at (Vincent.Safuto@scripps.com).

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