"All right, Mr. DeMille. I'm ready for my close-up."

Maureen Dowd compares newspapers to Norma Desmond -- the aging actress in "Sunset Boulevard" -- in today's NY Times. She also chats up the SF Chronicle's Phil Bronstein, who takes her on a nostalgia tour of the paper, the scenes of some of the paper's best reporting, and the soon to be obsolete icon of hard-driving newsfolk: the newspaper bar.

Read it here.

Here's a taste:

We drove around the city for hours, looking at places where journalism had had an impact. At police headquarters, [Bronstein] told of The Chronicle’s coverage of police brutality that forced the department to create a database tracking misbehaving officers. He talked about the paper’s AIDS coverage as we drove through the Castro and past San Francisco General Hospital, where the AIDS wards once overflowed. Parked outside the Giants’ ballpark, he praised the paper’s reporting on Barry Bonds and the steroids scandal, noting that “there are far fewer fly balls going out in the bay.”

His tour ended with cold comfort, as he observed that longer life expectancies may keep us on life support. “For people who still love print, who like to hold it, feel it, rustle it, tear stuff out, do their I. F. Stone thing, it’s important to remember that people are living longer,” he said. “That’s the most hopeful thing you can say about print journalism, that old people are living longer.”

so not news

In case you missed it, read this piece by Maureen Dowd on James Macpherson, who puts out Pasadena Now -- an online daily -- that is completely outsourced, as in reported and written, by writers in India. FYI: Pasadena is in California.

Words fail.

Writes Dowd:

He said he got the idea to outsource about a year ago, sitting in his Pasadena home, where he puts out Pasadena Now with his wife, Candice Merrill. Macpherson had worked in the ’90s for designers like Richard Tyler and Alan Flusser, and had outsourced some of his clothing manufacturing to Vietnam.

So, he thought, “Where can I get people who can write the word for less?” In a move that sounded so preposterous it became a Stephen Colbert skit, he put an ad on Craigslist for Indian reporters and got a flood of responses.

He fired his seven Pasadena staffers — including five reporters — who were making $600 to $800 a week, and now he and his wife direct six employees all over India on how to write news and features, using telephones, e-mail, press releases, Web harvesting and live video streaming from a cellphone at City Hall. “I pay per piece, just the way it was in the garment business,” he says. “A thousand words pays $7.50.”