We all know that newspapers were passed from one household to another at Rosewood in the early days. We know the papers from the old country were very popular. It didn't matter if the news was old, just the idea of having something to read was welcomed.
People in Thief River Falls double parked in front of the Times office to get a newspaper. At the time I was growing up, it was published twice weekly. In the few hundred hours I sat at the microfiche machine at the Moorhead Public Library, most of those deades were once a week. During the Lindbergh murders, it was a twice-weekly paper. The Times now offers the newspaper on Tuesday afternoon on line and the Northern Watch on Fridays. We all know that if we want to read the entire paper on line we must pay a yearly fee.
The Fargo Forum is like that too but only for archived articles. For less than five dollars a month you can browse numerous old articles from the comfort of your easy chair. Some of us scan several papers each morning. Recently a picture of a resting moose in south Fargo was emailed to New York state.
The Forum has new and improved weather page. The paper announced it would discontinue comics with color and use the color on the weather page. My sweet Thomas is a hard copy newspaper reader. When he laid the hard copy weather page on the desk and gave me a tour, of course I was interested.
He questions 'new and improved'. Although there is a fine color coded nearly half page map, he wonders how many folks are going to look at the color coding to find out temperatures. He wonders, too, why they are using a leaf with droplets on it for rain instead of the familiar cloud with rain descending.
He thought if they were going to spend that much space on weather, perhaps they needed to consider having the forecasts match up. In Sunday's paper, two forecasts were lined up together, both of them were different. Since he is the weatherperson of the house, I suggested that if the wind blew from northeast, use this column, if it blew from the southwest, use this column. The answer was not acceptable.
At the end of the discussion we had a plan. There should be isobars to actually show us where the system affecting us was coming from. Since we figured the page was addressed to an older generation, the information should be bigger and bold and the color coding should be phased out. The meteorologist responsible for the page should blog each day to teach us something. It should have icons for filtered sun; we should know why it was hazy.
And like most older Americans who are big on weather, we should write a letter to the editor of the newspaper!
Whether you watch the weather or not, we are all affected by it. Personally, I use the Norwegian rock theory: If the rock is wet, it is raining, if it is white, it is snowing. But then, the position of weatherperson in the house is already filled, isn't it?
The rock is wet in Fargo,
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