Holy Shiraz, red wine may be fountain of youth

 Health: Resveratrol, found in red wine, has been found to combat aging, Wired reports. (I’ll drink to that! ;^) Those performing the 28-day study were trying to get a drug called SRT501 approved for distribution. They say the drug has promise for fighting high blood sugar in diabetics, too.

Washington: National Taxpayer Advocate Nina E. Olson says that the Internal Revenue Service should reimburse taxpayers between $100 and $1,000 for “excessive expense or undue burden” they experience because of errors, The Washington Post reports.

Journalism:Sue Clark-Johnson is retiring as head of Gannett’s newspaper division, Editor & Publisher reports. Hmm, with Gannett’s stock prices plummeting drastically, you wonder if she was nudged into making this decision. Will other heads fall in a system-wide purge? *See related topic in Opinion below.

Nation: Within the past week, an oil tanker was stolen in Denver, LancasterOnline reports, and in Parrottsville, Tenn., the The Newport Plain Talk reports, “almost 200 sticks of dynamite along with blasting caps and several bags of ammonium nitrate were stolen.” Let’s hope these two stories don’t collide.

Business: CVS pharmacies have won approval to open health clinics in more than two dozen stores in Massachusetts, The Boston Globe reports.

O P I N I O N

What happens when all our jobs are overtaken by new technology (and what’s left is shipped overseas)? Think it can’t happen?
     I had lunch with a former co-worker on Monday. Not only had we worked together at our local newspaper, 20 years ago we both worked at a typesetting house. We were laughing about the old monster Compugraphic typesetting machines that would display one line of type at a time. Once you typed that line of text it had to be correct because when the next line started, there was no going back. On more modern typesetting equipment, we’d have to type out the macros that changed the appearance of the type (bold, centered, Caslon font, etc.) each time the text changed.
     We’d have to put galleys of text through the waxer machine so it could be trimmed and pasted down on the layout. The layout boards would then be photographed, the negative exposed to a photographic metal plate, put on a press, inked and then you could produce the written product. Of course, most of those steps are obsolete now. Today it can be done on your PC or Mac. Tomorrow? Maybe your cell phone. Heck, who needs them all when it can be printed in cyberspace on cool software such as WordPress.
     Before she was laid off last summer from the newspaper with about a dozen other employees — a fact never reported in any local media — my friend had to reapply for her job in the advertising art department. You see, their department was being whittled down to less than a handful of artists and proofers because their jobs were being outsourced to … INDIA! Can you stand it? They weren’t the only department being outsourced. Circulation staffers were laid off as calls were redirected to another city to our west, as were those who toned our photographs. They were being done in another big city even farther west. 
     With each step that might look favorable to investors inspecting a newspaper’s ledger, the subscribers lose that personal touch that mattered to them. They wanted a person who knew where their neighborhood was and what was happening there. They thought the subscriptions they were paying were supporting only local jobs. Wrong! But who will tell them?
     The bottom line is that these practices are NOT working. Newspaper subscriptions are plummeting. Bigwigs love to point to the Internet stealing away customers. Surely, that’s a part of it. But the truth is that greedy mega-media are keeping profits for CEOS and not reinvesting in  staff or replacing those who move on. Fewer people are doing more jobs. How can you possibly keep up with the new technology and achieve a proper balance between Web and newspaper at the same time?
     Technology is great, but if a newspaper falls because no one is left to run it, will any CEO hear it (or care)? 

♣ Nation/world news tally in my local paper today: 1¼ pages