Ready For Her Close-Up

Slouching Towards Oblivion
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: April 25, 2009

Maureen Dowd continues her California vacation hunting for the perfect metaphor for the end of the newspaper industry. Being a fan of old movies, it only makes sense that she would stumble upon Sunset Boulevard, the classic Gloria Swanson movie about an aging star unwilling to adjust to the reality of a changing marketplace.

Maybe it’s because I’m staying at the Sunset Tower on Sunset Boulevard, but I keep thinking of newspapers as Norma Desmond.

Papers are still big. It’s the screens that got small.

That paraphrase of the classic line gets hammered into metaphor one more time.

...old-school newspapers seem like aging silent film stars, stricken to find themselves outmoded by technology.

With the Movies With Maureen® reference out of the way, she goes for the distance record for a Dowdversion™ compare/contrast. She starts with...

Journalists are still hot in Hollywood.

And an entire paragraph later sums up with...

But in real life, journalists are feeling the chill.

And to get that walking past the graveyard feeling she takes a newsroom tour with her Celebrity Quote of the week, Phil Bronstein, whose claim to fame is that his celebrity ex-wife tried to feed him to a reptile.

“This is called the Komodo Dragon Room, for obvious reasons,” he said dryly, referring to the time his ex-wife, Sharon Stone, gave him a meet-and-greet session with a Komodo dragon, who mistook his foot for a snack.

And what better metaphor could you ask for than for a denizen of the newsroom to be devoured by a dinosaur.