I was at the doctor's office the other day...

...and I picked up the current issue of Time magazine in the waiting room. Two thoughts ran through my mind. The first was the old Seinfeld bit about waiting in the waiting room only to be led by a nurse to a second, smaller "waiting room" where you take off your clothes, sit up on a table, and wait some more for the Delicate Genius to show up. Personally, I've always chafed at calling doctors "Doctor." I guess it's just my egalitarian nature. So I always make a point of calling them by their first name (hell, most of them are younger than me, anyway) and wait for their reaction. I usually chuckle a little as they often look startled as if I just swore at them or something. Who do these people think they are, anyway? They were just the nerds in college who stayed in and studied while the rest of us were out getting drunk. I had one dentist who insisted on calling me "Mr. Tracy" even though I always called her "Ruth." I wanted to say, "Stop it, we're the same age! You're the kind of chick I used to moon!"

The second thought I had was who, besides my sister, still gets Time magazine delivered to their house? In fact, who reads Time or Newsweek at all? When I saw Richard Stengel of Time on Charlie Rose talking about how they chose Barack Obama as Man of the Year I thought, does anyone still care about that? Could there really be anything in that article that we don't already know about Obama? And don't even get me started on Jon Meacham, the pompous editor of Newsweek.

(As an aside, Time was almost required reading in my house growing up. So much so in fact, that when I was discussing something with someone from Europe once, he finally asked me in exasperation, "You read Time magazine, don't you?" It's like when I hear someone today spouting the neocon or free market talking points I want to ask them if they read anything besides the Wall Street Journal.)

But the point of all this is to call your attention to two good pieces I read this week. The first is "How to Save your Newspaper," by Walter Isaacson in the current Time, and its rebuttal, "You Can't Sell News by the Slice," by Michael Kinsley in yesterday's New York Times. Since nobody reads anything that anyone recommends anyway, I'll summarize them for you. The first one takes on the subject of how newspapers are in decline due to free content on the Internet. The author gives his prescription for saving the industry by what he calls "micropayments," in which readers would be charged small amounts by the article. If this sounds like the end of the gravy train for us cheapskate surfers, don't worry, because Kinsley explains exactly how and why that won't happen. Phew!

According to Kinsley, it's a myth that newspaper readers ever actually paid for content in the first place. What they paid for was paper, ink, and the delivery cost. This, by the way, was a money loser for the papers. So not only has free content been good for readers, but it's actually been good for the newspapers. The reason your local paper (like the Chicago Tribune) is going out of business isn't that people aren't buying it at the newsstands, but that for the first time in history they are experiencing competition. Not only can I read the Times online before it's delivered to my door, but I can read dozens of other newspapers as well. (By the way, I can't resist mentioning the name of the new Mexican owner of the Times, Carlos Slim. Sounds like something out of a Quentin Tarantino movie, doesn't it?)

So that's my recommendation for today. Oh, and you can read both articles online, for free.