Shrinky Dinks, a local invention, are back. For those not in the know, Shrinky Dinks are little pieces of plastic that children decorate (or more accurately, color in) and then heat. The Shrinky Dinks then melt down in size. I have a Shrinky Dink magnet on my refrigerator that Day-Hay made me. I�m so glad to be in.

Shrinky Dinks, however, are of little importance to me. I am writing about them to make a different point. What matters is not the Shrinky Dinks but how I know about the Shrinky Dinks. I know about the Shrinky Dinks because they are a front-page story. Not the headline, thank goodness we haven�t slipped that badly, but front-page nonetheless�and the story below has about as much heavy news value.

If television news is designed to leave one ignorant about most world events and depressed at all the local crime, the newspaper seems designed to leave one ignorant about most world events and happy, happy, happy. Read the first page. Learn about Shrinky Dinks and e-classes at the state university. Oh, yes, and there was a lot of terrorism in Israel yesterday, as the headline states, but most of the story is buried in the middle of the newspaper.

If my local paper focused on the local area well, I might overlook its international and national flaws but my local paper no longer covers local stories requiring any depth of understanding regularly (although, to be fair, they recently did a reasonably good story on school finance, a hot issue that can put the populace to sleep with its details.) When the afternoon and the morning paper merged, we were promised an expanded local community section. We had it for approximately a year and then the Metro section shrunk and what there was of it filled with obituaries and other types of local notices, including the local crime blotters.

I generally am happy to live in the Midwest but I miss the New York Times. I would get it delivered but the local version is not as good as the New York version and, more important, the Times can produce the news but not deliver the newspaper. If you want true frustration, ask for delivery of that paper. You will get bills regularly and see the paper once a month. In the meantime, you will have gotten on their list of people to whom they should try to sell subscriptions.

I admit to being a bit of a news junkie. I�m sadly in need of a fix.

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