Newspapers

 

January 17, 2022

 

Greetings from the lede,

 I bought a newspaper last week.  It is such a remarkable thing that I can also tell you the last time I bought one.  It didn’t just dawn on me, I have been aware, but the newspaper has nearly vanished from my life, and I miss it.  So, I’m telling you, because I think you do too, sometimes.

 I don’t have a favorite newspaper, but if I did, this one would not be it.  Not because of the writing or the editorial stance or the quality of the layout.  It is missing some personality.  Comics, for example.  Commentary on the opinion page that obviously comes from the writer’s personal experience, with no apology.  Even so, it was good to have my hands on the news.

 I grew up with newspapers in the house, piles of them.  I loved the Sunday comics, in color, spent time looking at pictures and reading the shorter pieces, curious but not engaged.  Later I learned that the people who made the paper were important; not celebrities, but legitimately important.  I began to read with more respect for the ideas there, and how they were presented.

 When I was young, maybe ten, I inherited a paper route from a neighbor kid.  There was no contract, no orientation, just a list of addresses that expected the paper to be delivered.  A truck would come and unceremoniously drop the efforts of hundreds of people in a bound cube of newsprint at the end of my street.  With even less ceremony, I would open the cube and fold each paper into rolls that could be more or less efficiently flung at people’s porches, from my ink-stained hands.

 On Sundays the papers were gargantuan and had to be wrapped in rubber bands.  There were more sections, with more pages, and then there was giant stuffers that went in every paper, advertisements from Kmart and Hamady Brothers and Radio Shack.  Once the papers were rolled, I filled an enormous canvas bag with the results, hoisted it over my bony shoulders, and then staggered under the weight of journalism for an hour every afternoon and a bit more on Sunday mornings.  I can’t say I represented the vocation proudly.

 This little window of time captures how newspapers mattered to me and I didn’t know why.  It was easier to take them for granted, resent their presence, even.  They were heavy and dirty and distracted me from my fun.

 When I had my first address of my own, I ordered a newspaper delivered every day.  Later I took two a day, a frivolous excess, but I liked having the contrast of writing, even when the papers covered the same stories.  I felt grown up, responsible, paying attention to the world in this way, even if I didn’t always understand it.  It wasn’t long before the papers piled up and automatically were recycled, most unread.  I rarely missed the comics, if that tells you anything.

 Years rolled on and then the days came when I thought the newspapers were a silly expense.  If I wanted to know the news, I would watch TV.  On the off chance I wanted a paper, I would buy one, read it while I was eating lunch.  The world rolled on, made news, it was written about, and explained and made relevant, and sometimes I knew and other times I didn’t.

 This little window of time captures how newspapers mattered to me and I didn’t know why.  It was easier to take them for granted, resent their presence, even.  They were heavy and dirty and distracted me from my fun.

 One day, maybe eighteen years ago, an editor of the Flint Journal took me to lunch and asked me if I would be interested in writing a column for the paper.  Which I was, and I did.  For five years I was a tiny, trivial part of the character of our newspaper.  I wrote funny things to distract people from their horoscopes or the weather, which coincidentally were on the same page as my column.  It was interesting and challenging and led to very rich and satisfying moments. 

 It also meant I was paying close attention when the newspapers faltered, when the world no longer saw them as relevant or fast enough.  My perspective was like a stagehand, holding the scripts, while the main players stood under the lights and watched the audience get up and leave during the second act.  Watched the boards dissolve around them, watched what mattered to them become an empty space.

 I have been around long enough, and have been aware enough, to know that when newspapers began to fail, something changed in how the news of the world reached us.  In truth, I didn’t know it until after, which is the worst time to learn that kind of lesson.

 I’m not naïve, I know that the motives of the publishers and editors and writers of the newspapers were not always simple and pure.  But I suspect that the ethical standards, the values that were imposed by the people who brought us newspapers were more carefully considered than what we experience today.  I will also add that there is value in having the news shared by people in your community.  There is a contract, and a sense of responsibility, in that connection.

 I won’t apologize for the bit of newspaper nostalgia here, and the similarity to the poetic nature of listening to good music on a record album.  I like the feel of a newspaper.  I like looking at the words in print, especially when it’s clear that whoever wrote them, and edited them, cared about the reader.  Respected us.  There is a relationship there that is missing in some other media.   That came back to me last week when I bought a newspaper, that heavy, dirty, portal to another time.  I miss it.

  

Hope this finds you licking your thumb to turn the page,

 

David

 

 

Copyright © 2022 David Smith