You don't want to read this.

Everybody blames the Internet for the decline of newspapers, but the Web is only the most recent of electric interruptions to have disturbed their profitability, which began with radio in the late 1920s and was followed by broadcast television, car radios, transistor radios, FM radio, and cable television. Newspapers were in so much advertising trouble in September 1941 that Time magazine ran a piece about their “downward economic spiral.” Press scholar David R. Davies argues in his 2006 book The Postwar Decline of American Newspapers, 1945-1965 that daily newspapers were in serious trouble by the mid-1960s, because, among other things, they had failed to hook the baby boom generation. Los Angeles Times press reporter David Shaw sounded the alarm in a 1976 piece in his newspaper. It began: “Are you now holding an endangered species in your hands?” Update the figures and change a few dates and the names of the principals in Shaw’s piece and you could almost pass it off as a 2012 diagnosis of newspaper industry ills.

—Jack Shafer, Reuters. The Great Newspaper Liquidation. (via futurejournalismproject)

You could do this with so many different things.

(via npr)

caro:

Breast cancer has ripped through my family so violently that I’m pretty much guaranteed to get it in a pretty nasty form down the road if I haven’t already managed to get mauled to death by rabid howler monkeys. But I have a good job, great health insurance, and an awesome doctor who is already helping me a lot with regard to prevention and early detection. A lot of women aren’t lucky enough to have any of this.

Komen’s decision to stop funding Planned Parenthood’s free cancer screenings for low-income women is yet another reason why the organization disgusts me and will never get a cent from me. It does spend plenty of money on exorbitant executive salaries, showy marketing, and predatory lawsuits against smaller charities that come within a football field’s distance of maybe-possibly-sort-of emulating its logo or messaging. So donate to an organization like BCRF instead, please.

And while you’re at it, I’d recommend throwing some pocket change to Planned Parenthood, which by the way spends most of its time preventing abortions rather than performing them, thanks to educational programs and contraceptive distribution.

(Link via rachelfershleiser)

(via soupsoup)

I feel that so much of the kind of murderous rhetoric of American politics and what we decry as the ‘decline of civility’ or ‘hyperpartisanship’ are really troubling as a citizen to watch. And I do think that even when we’re not talking about abortion, we are talking about abortion.

—In November, Terry interview The New Yorker’s Jill Lepore about the politicization of abortion and birth control, and about the history and future of Planned Parenthood. (via nprfreshair)

(via npr)