Monday Musings: Shrinkage, Bigness and Impending Doom!

The Incredible Shrinking Paper

On the train this morning, my friend pulled out the latest iteration of the Philadelphia Inquirer, now a diminutive 11'' by 11'' before unfolding—tabloid country, and one inch shorter (by my reckoning) than the city's alternative weekly, City Paper. "The physical change to the paper mirrors an industry standard adopted by many large U.S. papers, including the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and Miami Herald," an announcement says, though, in holding the thing, I suspect I will always regard it as something of a scale model of a real newspaper. With plate-sized papers and post offices in strip malls, our old pillars of society are looking more and more like matchsticks. Ah well, at least the oil companies still know how to go big.