I had a little thing in the Los Angeles Times today -- a harmless little "newspaper humor" column of the "Hey, those lawn sprinklers got me all wet" school. Sadly, nobody read it and I forgot all about it until tonight. I guess I should walk around and look for a newspaper rack on Sunset or something. Maybe when I take the dog out for his goodnight walk. Or not.
Here's some scientific research evidence based on my very occasional newspaper work: Nobody ever reads anything in a newspaper, or on a newspaper website. It's like writing for the English-language paper in Guam or wherever. Very strange, because there are thousands of people working at a paper like the LA Times and (supposedly) hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Do they really exist, these subscribers?
I've written "op-ed" things for at least a few big and semi-big U.S. dailies -- the Los Angeles Daily News, San Francisco Chronicle, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, San Diego Union-Tribune, North County Times, etc. -- and a lot of foreign papers. Nobody reads the things. If I could get it published in a paper, I could claim the Pope was a Nazi Robot White-Supremacist Jew who committed 9/11 to stop the Duck Satanists from revealing the UFO plan to the Night Muslims, and exactly nobody would see it. Maybe if you write for the NYT or the Washington Post, you can cause a ruckus by writing that Hillary Clinton killed Barack Obama's father ... maybe. Probably not.