I’ve worked at eight newspapers in 33 years*, though two of them suggest that the total is actually 10. The Hong Kong Standard was revamped and rebranded as the Hong Kong iMail while I was there, and currently The Nation in Bangkok is burping a squawking baby named Daily Xpress (not THE Daily Xpress, just Daily Xpress).

Kids have funny names these days, don’t they? But what’s funnier — at times, less so at others — is the state in which newspaper owners come back from media conferences where they’ve been breathing the hyper-charged oxygen piped in from cyberspace.

Nation founder and group editor-in-chief Suthichai Yoon, who’s old enough to know better, and Nation president Pana Janviroj, who’s not, are high as Himalayan yaks at the moment. They think the Internet is God and insist that their employees join them in worshipping at the altar of the World Wide Web.

I have plenty of reverence for the Net, but in terms of faith I’m very much an agnostic. I expect the Web will still be 90% trivia the day I die and long afterward too. But now the printed news media, convinced by advertisers that the only market is youth, are frantically replicating its format and giving more weight to page views than facts checked, more heft to hit counts than a decent story well told.

Two millennia ago, the original Americans in what is now southern Utah used to catch up on the news at the place pictured above (with the alien mascot of Daily Xpress peeking over its summit).

People from different clans — the Anasazi, Basketmaker, Fremont, Pueblo, Navajo, Fremont, Ute, Anglo … a real gathering of the tribes — would stop off at the big red sandstone cliff that the Navajo eventually called Tse’ Hane, which means “rock that tells a story”, and they’d tell a story in art. Today we call this art petroglyphs and the place Newspaper Rock.

The iconic symbols the artists favoured — humans, animals and abstract doodlings or directions or possibly magical talismans (or “games, wedding announcements, football scores, tall tales or advertisements”, as one online wag put it) — are found in many other sites in North America, just as graffiti is common in all the modern cities, but there are hundreds of them here, all carved in one 200-square-foot installation.

They’re inscribed into the “desert varnish”, a blackish manganese-iron deposit that rainfall and bacteria gradually form on exposed sandstone.

Not a lot of tourists come to this state historical monument among the cottonwoods because they’re in a hurry to get to the more famous Needles in Canyonlands National Park not far away. In news terms, the taller and admittedly more surreal Needles are Paris Hilton and Newspaper Rock is a the Old Woman in the Shoe.

Below, the locale as seen on Google Earth.

Newspaper Rock, which has a parking lot but lost its campsite because of the danger of flash floods through Indian Creek Canyon, isn’t a national park. In fact it was downgraded a few years ago from state park to state monument!

But the upside of that is that the setting is extremly peaceful, only the occasional rumble of an arriving motor home to disturb your meditation on the phenomenon of human communication and how it has “progressed”.

There are a bunch of websites with photos of Newspaper Rock but, inexplicably, some of them want cash — just like the prehistoric newspapers. Instead, see the increasingly interesting Gigapixl, Eric Goetze’s excellent panorama views at Virtual Parks page or Max Bertola’s southern Utah site, complete with his amusing “interpretations”.

An earlier post about newspapering:
Loving the alien: Xpress train to the future

* For the record, the Alliston Herald, Guelph Daily Mercury, Halton Hills Herald and Georgetown Independent / Acton Free Press in Ontario, Canada; The Nation and Bangkok Post in Thailand; the Hong Kong Standard / iMail; and the Shanghai Daily.