As another decade dawns, I find that remarkably little has changed in my world to reflect this unstoppable march of time. My day and my week are made of routines that differ very little from five years ago, with the possible exception being that I rarely, if ever, use my land line telephone anymore. In fact, I don’t even know the number!
For the most part, I function just fine on 2005 mode, but I have been noticing (and fearing) a major shift on the horizon: the loss of my daily newspaper. You have to understand that I am a read-aholic; I need to indulge in the printed word at least three to four times a day. It goes something like this: wake up in the morning, walk the hound no matter what the weather, read the PD over breakfast, grunt sleepily at family members and trek off to the job. At lunchtime, hide away with some eats and whatever there is to read that’s handy. At bedtime, prop myself up with a few pillows, grab my latest book (The Steel Wave by Michael Shaara) and try to read without waking the spouse. Mr. Excitement, right?
Now, an essential piece of the routine outlined above (maybe THE essential piece) is the local newspaper. I’m a confessed newsie, but I have to read it in print - not on a monitor, Notebook, or a Kindle, but on good old cheap and greasy newsprint. I love the hassle of it…taking up half the table, knocking things over, losing my bagel under the Art & Leisure Section. I like to take my time, reading all from page A-1 all the way to G-12, enjoying the thrill of the hunt and the joy of discovery. Many are the times I have been late for something because I got caught up in an article on the capture of a giant squid in a far away sea, or reading the box score of yet another Indians loss, or checking out the latest exploits of Rat and Pig on Pearls Before Swine on the comics page. And don’t get me started on the crossword puzzles!
But I am not oblivious to the almost daily shrinking of both the text and the number of pages in the paper that is left in my front yard (or in my bushes, or on my roof) each morning by some mysterious pre-dawn visitor. Early in the week, when ad sales are low, the paper is barely thick enough to line a bird cage, let alone fill my brain with informational minutiae. Things get a little more promising as the week progresses, but today’s paper bears little resemblance even to the little local paper I enjoyed reading as a youth back in western New York. It will be a sad day indeed when it becomes impossible to support printing costs any longer and the real daily paper goes the way of the dodo.
I am saddened at the thought of what kind of world will be left behind when this is the case. Personally, I cannot imagine waking up to my laptop, silently scrolling my way through world, national, local and feature news. I know that I suffer from an information gap as a result of being a media dinosaur. I understand that while most everyone in the western world will know the timely details of some breaking story to the nth degree, I will probably just be made aware that there is a story. I’m fully aware that any weather forecast I may quote will be so horribly out of date as to be useless, and that I will have to wait two whole days to learn how well the orchestra played last night, but I’m OK with all that. For most of my life that kind of gap was perfectly acceptable, and life is a mystery anyway, so what’s the big fuss?
I’m trying not to sound like a cranky, Luddite geezer. I’m really not. I adapted to microwave ovens, I can adapt to anything. But in the meantime I will continue to bang the drum for the print media, and I will do my part to keep newspapers alive. And I will mourn deeply if they become a thing of the past. There is still great value in newspapers, magazines, and journals. If you feel the same, please continue your patronage of these media and their advertisers. There may still be life in the old rags yet!
Have a great week!
No comments:
Post a Comment