Hinterland Diary 07.23.07

While Russell Baker muses on the fate of newspapers in the wake of scandal, executive bullying and plummeting circulation for the New York Review of Books, David Shumway thinks about the rise and fall of musical celebrity -- mostly James Brown -- in the current Age of the iPod.

Can newspapers learn anything from the Napster-inspired travails of the music industry?

CD sales dropped a whopping 20 percent in the first quarter of 2007, following already precipitous plunges in sales. Before you say people must be buying their music online, consider this: Experts estimate that a billion songs are traded illegally every month, undermining any semblance of control and authority that the major labels, radio companies and even the Almighty MTV used to have. All they can do now is scare college kids with legal letters.

What can small-town newspapers in the American Outback learn from this?