An Interview with Ben

In which he says: I'm sheltered a little at the Times from the woes of the industry, but it's rare that I'm impressed by out of town newspapers, and I buy them — all of them — everywhere I go. Seems like so much slash and burn has skinned a lot of papers down to nothing. To beef jerky. They read horrible and look irrelevant and feel like the flesh of a 100-year-old man. How many stories are we missing because the corporate owners won't employ enough people to give a few of them the time to roam around and be curious? How much better could towns and cities all over the map be if newspapers were still the connective tissue? That's what's slipping: that connective tissue.