When a major newspaper throws in the towel

On Thursday of last week, the Diamondback, the paper at the University of Maryland, had a story about some students not liking changes to the wraps produced by the school's dining services.

That may (may...) be important on campus, but presumably it's not a story of any consequence to people beyond the campus, right?

Right?

Four days later, the Washington Post is on the case. Reporter Mike Rosenwald, an 8 year veteran of the Post, chimes in via his blog for the paper about Maryland. Rosenwald's got the cut-and-paste feature on his computer figured out, and throws in some painful commentary for good measure.

As FakeJimVandeHei would say, these people broke Watergate?

Rosenwald's piece is perhaps the embodiment of what we call the Hamster Wheel, of writing something for the sake of writing something. And it's a particularly ugly version of it. But then there's this:

Only the dead panda (RIP) is topping this within the Metro section. I don't have the data to know what's what. How are people getting to the wrap article? The piece has been featured high on the Metro page all day, even into the night. But it's hard to know which comes first here, the chicken (Post promotion of the article high on metro page) or the egg (that the article took off by itself, at which point the Post kept promoting it). Neither is pretty.

As awkward as this episode is, consider that the Post is going to continue dying a slow death, and there will be more of these ahead.