A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.
Arthur Miller
I just received a terrific gift. A shopping bag filled with newspapers. I know it's not a new bag or bracelet but I was thrilled none the less. I won't be wrapping fish or dishes in them...these are keepsakes to be put carefully away. They include copies of papers from Inauguration Day from all over the country and they will be stored along with so many other papers I have collected ever since I can remember...papers reporting and commemorating important events that chronicle my time elections,championships,tragedies,celebrations, even snowstorms.
So many daily life memories that I cherish include the newspaper...digging through the snow to find the morning paper, my dog tearing the Sunday paper to shreds in clearly an act of rebellion from paper training days, my Grandmother cutting out coupons, my Grandfather taking his daily walk to buy the paper, my Dad on the couch with the sports section or any section and my Mom picking those sections up off the floor where he had dropped them.
I learned to read from the newspaper-sitting on my Daddy's lap sounding out word by word the sports section and the Funnies. Miss Peach, Mutt and Jeff, Peanuts...were my reading buddies. Dr. Seuss came along later but by then I already knew how to make out the words. My relationship with newspapers started that early and a daily paper has been a part of my world ever since.
I read about eight newspapers in a day. When I'm in a town with only one newspaper, I read it eight times.
Will Rogers
There is a romance of course to newspapers and the newspaper business that is ingrained into our popular culture...I think of Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday, Clark Gable in It Happened One Night, Citizen Kane,All the President's Men, Clark Kent,the trench coat/ fedora wearing/cigar chomping beat reporter notebook or typewriter by the side...think Spencer Tracy of course.
Many of us worked on a school newspaper and grew up in an era that the definition of journalism could be found only in print. The importance of newspaper to journalism aside, there is the institution, the habit, the dependability, the constant in a world without constants, of a daily paper in our lives.
Now newspapers are finding that they are reporting on themselves. That is certainly what is happening in Boston. The Boston Globe is reporting the major story of the potential of their own demise...and it is perhaps one of the most shocking stories they could ever write. Boston without the Globe--unthinkable!
Life without newsprint is really unthinkable, yet that appears to be where we are heading...and fast. Rapid changes in how we communicate and consume information, the speed at which events can be reported and received, coupled with an economic meltdown have meant that the Daily Paper has become a dinosaur...not to me!
As more Americans turn to online news and the recession eats away at advertising dollars, some newspapers are going out of business and others are struggling to stay afloat. The newspaper business is in serious serious trouble. In April media columnist Michael Wolff dramatically declared that in “...about 18 months from now, 80percent of newspapers will be gone."
According to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press only 33% of those polled say they would personally miss reading the local newspaper a lot if it were no longer available. Many papers have already shut their doors and countless numbers of small town and big city papers are teetering on the brink of doing the same. Papers that were considered institutions are gone. In March, the 146-year-old Seattle Post-Intelligencer published its last print edition and Denver's Rocky Mountain News closed down its presses after nearly 150 years of putting out a daily paper.
Not only are we facing a future of one newspaper towns but many towns with no daily paper at all. It is a horrible thought for a civilized society...do I sound out of touch, not progressive, stuck in my ways? so be it! I have a Blackberry, I have a laptop, I have a cell phone--they aren't newspapers...period!
Newspapers are a valued cornerstone of our lives. We turn to them on good days and on bad. Thomas Jefferson who of course never had a Twitter address, believed that newspapers were critical for creating and maintaining a true democracy by informing the public. In 1787, he wrote "Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to choose the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers, and be capable of reading them."
The need for consuming news will of course never disappear. How we receive news has changed dramatically in a very short time,however, and traditional newspapers either didn't see it coming or don't have a clue how to do it differently and still turn a profit. Today as we redefine "what news is"-Twitter, Facebook, blogs, online e-zines... a printed piece of paper that arrives on your doorstep 24 hours after an event some claim has lost its relevancy. This coupled with the fierce competition for ad dollars and the the true loss of the Classifieds to sites like Craig's List has left the business of newspapers and their survival in deep deep trouble. Ironically this happens at a time when we need newspapers more than perhaps ever before.
Television has a real problem. They have no page two. Consequently every big story gets the same play and comes across to the viewer as a really big, scary one. ~Art Buchwald, 1969
In an age filled with "get it out there" news the truth, the facts are missing very often. Yes,you can get info anytime anywhere..but what is that info, who is putting it out there and how carefully? Reading on a laptop does not give you the ponder ability, you lose the flip through,clip out,curl up, sit with..component that we have taken for granted. A newspaper is unique in its ability to present life from birth to death and everything in the middle in one net format.
"...For every disgrace there is triumph, for every wrong there is a moment of justice, for every funeral a wedding, for every obituary a birth announcement." Anna Quindlen
Old fashioned? Antiquated? Dinosaurs? perhaps, but I for one will not easily toss my newspapers recycle bin yet.
"More than 100 million adults in the United States read a printed newspaper every day — more than watched the Super Bowl. As troubled as the U.S. economy is, if 100 million consumers want and use something, that product usually doesn't go away," Gary Pruitt, CEO of the newspaper company McClatchy Co.
I refuse to even imagine a day without a newspaper, tangible, ink stained,bulletin board postable. As generations before me have done I hope to always pick that paper up off the front step and greet the day knowing that if the paper is there the world is still in orbit.
