It is raining and still light, so the new leaves are exuberantly green with the gift. For many of them, it is their first rain, and they are drinking it in.
The New Yorker has an article on the demise of the newspaper.
You can check it out at: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/03/31/080331fa_fact_alterman
One thing it brings out is that newspapers have supported reporters who made the effort to be impartial. In the past, people in a city were all reading the same news that day. Now, they read online, and they can choose news that already fits their views.
I have thought that the internet was a positive in the distribution of news, exposing us to more viewpoints than we might have imagined, but the New Yorker story ends with this paragraph.
"Finally, we need to consider what will become of those people, both at home and abroad, who depend on such journalistic enterprises to keep them safe from various forms of torture, oppression and injustice. "People do awful things to each other," the veteran war photographer George Guthrie says in "Night and Day," Tom Stoppard's 1978 play about foreign correspondents. "But it's worse in places where everybody is kept in the dark." Ever since James Franklin's New England Courant started coming off the presses, the daily newspaper, more than any other medium, has provided the information that the nation needed if it was to be kept "out of the dark." Just how an Internet-based news culture can spread the kind of "light" that is necessary to prevent terrible things, without the armies of reporters and photographers that newspapers have traditionally employed, is a question that even the most ardent democrat in John Dewey's tradition may not wish to see answered."