[originaltext] A good modern newspaper is an extraordinary piece of reading.

A good modern newspaper is an extraordinary piece of reading. It is remarkable first for what it contains: the range of news from local crime to international politics, from sport to business to fashion to science, and the range of comment and special features as well, from editorial page to feature articles and interviews to criticism of books, art, theatre and music. A newspaper is even more remarkable for the way one reads it: never completely, never straight through, but always by jumping from here to there, in and on glancing at one piece, reading another article all the way through, reading just a few paragraphs of the next. A good modem newspaper offers a variety to attract many different readers, but far more than any one reader is interested in. What brings this variety together in one place is its topicality, its immediate relation to what is happening in your world end your locality now. But immediacy and the speed of production that goes with it mean also that much of what appears in a newspaper has no more than transient value. For all these reasons, no two people really read the same paper: what each person does is to put together out of the pages of that day’s paper, his own selection and sequence, his own newspaper. For all these reasons, reading newspapers efficiently, which means getting what you want from them without missing things you need but without wasting time, demands skill end self-awareness as you modify and apply the techniques of reading.