![]() ![]() WIRE NEWSRACK MAGAZINE CODEThe illustrator Christoph Niemann brilliantly condensed this code to its essence in a photograph he made for the New York Times several years ago. Going back a little further, people might recall black plastic for Vita.mn, green plastic for The Onion, or yellow metal for the Tribune. Longtime residents know the color code – green for the Strib, dark blue for the PiPress, red plastic for City Pages, yellow plastic for Lavender. It’s a code that both longtime citizens and newcomers use. The newspaper box, lined up in a row with others on a street corner or by a bus stop, has been as an establishing shot for scenes of urban life for 70 years. It’s physically written on the landscape. (Or the biggest news of the day before, at least, since you’ll undoubtedly have already seen it on Facebook or Twitter.) Seeing Prince through that window, though, embalmed in newsprint and the headline’s typeface at the size typically used for election results or military conflicts, really drove the point home: Yes, this was a truly big deal for my city. ![]() For all the ground print media has lost in the past 10 or 15 years, you can still see a headline on a street corner and know generally what the biggest news of the day is. I reflexively shot a photo of it on my phone – I knew this was a memory I wanted to save. Below that was Prince, mid- skweeeeee on an electric guitar solo, peeking just torso-level over the edge of the window containing the newspaper. Of all I’d seen and heard in the last 24 hours, on- and offline, it was an errant glance over to the green Star Tribune newspaper box that really re-emphasized the enormity of the whole situation to me. The day after Prince died, I was standing outside the White Castle on East Lake Street eating a cheeseburger and waiting for the No. ![]()
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