When I was four years old, I would hear the doorbell and run to see who was there. Often I would dash off and report to my mother or father “It’s the Fifty Cent Boy!” They knew exactly what I meant. We received two newspapers daily, the Hartford Courant in the morning and Hartford Times in the evening. Each was delivered by a teenaged boy, and the fee was fifty cents (each!) per week. That money was collected with meticulous regularity. I believed in the Fifty Cent Boy. He was much more real than Santa Claus.
Newspapers were important in our household. I used to wonder how my parents could stare for so long without turning a page. Must be very interesting! I got hooked by the time I was ten. Predictably, my first obsession was the “funnies”. I read them lying flat on the floor. The ink was cheap and blackened by elbows. I got in trouble if I was wearing a light colored, long sleeved shirt. If bare armed, I was nagged to wash my elbows.
We used to argue over who got which section first. Usually there were three of us arguing over four sections, but no one was really going to preempt my Dad. My sister soon developed an interest in “Dear Abby”, so she would settle for the women’s section. Where WERE the comics? Was it at the back of the sports section? Or the back of the classified ads? Wherever they were, it was consistent. It took me a while to develop an interest in the front page and the editorials, but over time, it happened.
I missed the familiar papers when I went away to Michigan for college. Mom (a faithful correspondent) mailed me the occasional comic strip. When the bomb squad got called to my high school (due to an error in ordering chemicals for the science lab), Mom sent me the news article.
But there was a newspaper at Michigan State University! Called, I think, the Michigan State News and billed as “Michigan’s Largest Morning Daily”. I think the only higher-circulation paper in the state was the Detroit Free Press, locally known as “The Freep”. I was charged two dollars per semester for the Michigan State News. Once at registration, I was approached by a friend who had a full tuition/room and board scholarship. She had come to registration without her wallet. She needed two dollars to pay for the newspaper, or she wouldn’t be able to complete registration. I helped her out.
I liked the Michigan State News, though I don’t remember much detail. Later, I went to graduate school at a university that also published a daily paper. This is an advantage of a large institution!
Next, I fetched up in York, PA. There must have been a newspaper, and I did read it. But did I have it delivered? By the time I got acquainted and felt an interest in local issues, I was gone. Two years is a short time to live in a community.
Then I moved to New Jersey. Two newspapers competed for my attention, the Press of Atlantic City and the Philadelphia Inquirer. Getting both seemed silly and (in those pre-electronic days) generated too much waste paper. At what point did I start worrying about conserving paper? Maybe 1980?
For a time, I assumed I needed the Press, since I worked for local (county) government. Why didn’t a copy automatically turn up at work?? The Inquirer fell by the wayside.
For a few years, we supplemented the Press with the Washington Post Weekly, a compendium that emphasized editorial content. I liked it. But almost every week, the cover showed an enlarged version of the most controversial or amusing editorial cartoon. Have you ever tried to explain editorial cartoons to a bright and curious six year old? Week after week, we confronted symbolic and allusional graphics. Why is that man waving a coat hanger? What’s bad about the elephant? Who knows what misconceptions my hasty explanations may have been planted in my son’s impressionable brain?
Then followed my long and ambivalent relationship with the Press of Atlantic City. Why did they insist on sending me the Cape May edition? If I lived on the other side of the street, I would have gotten the more relevant Atlantic County edition. Eventually, we switched to electronic delivery, but the problem about which edition did not disappear. Our subscription got scrambled, and now I’m limited to a few articles a month. I seem, however, always to have access to obituaries.
Parallel to all of this, two other news sources have been valuable to me – the Chronicle of Higher Education and the New York Times. The electronic version of the Chronicle is available to me at work, fully enabled for prime content. Yea! I try to limit the amount of (work) time I spend with it. High quality writing, links to good blogs (I like the one called Lingua Franca), issues that matter to me (like campus climate and incidents following the election).
Then there’s the New York Times. Always there. Stockton University (my employer) has an educational deal with the Times, so any student can get an on-line subscription, and free print copies are delivered to campus five days each week during the academic semester. The expectation is that some faculty members will use the Times in their classes. I certainly would if I was still teaching. Their coverage of climate change is high quality. I really should give in and send the Times the few dollars they request for an on line subscription. Meanwhile, I enjoy the print copies, though to some extent I had to “relearn” how to read the Times after spending too much time on line with CNN and other “lite” news sites. Times articles are sufficiently complex that you don’t always realize from the headline that you will find the article worthwhile.
So where does all of this leave me? I don’t watch TV news. I check CNN on line daily. I get news from Facebook. The age of newspapers as my “major” news source is over.
What stimulated this flood of reflection? This morning I walked into my local diner, and my husband picked up the Press of Atlantic City. “Look, an artifact!” he exclaimed. A print copy! Print circulation is dwindling away. Farewell to my favorite news medium.
AMG Reading Journal 