Newspapers are wonderful. They arrive on the step like a gift and come into the house like an old friend. They spread out on the kitchen table and wait patiently while we peruse at our own speed – not minding the spills, the splashes, the grapefruit squirts.
They lie around, stack up, and bring an air of this-is-a-family-that-reads clutter to the home. And they’re nearly indispensable when it comes to packing china. Training dogs. Wrapping fish.
But for some people, wrapping fish is not enough. No, the news that was hot 12 hours ago doesn’t fill a need right now, and reading through one poorly paid writer’s take on a subject is never quite enough. They want more. They want to be up-to-date. They want to talk back and participate. They want to social-network the news.
So they do.
Many of us will always love the paper. We’ll always love magazines, books, and the feel of turning pages in our hands. Some of us hope the newspaper world will never completely disappear, with its sense of spatial order and random discovery. We hope people will never stop stumbling across the pages of history squirreled away in the attic; never stop reading the hometown news.
But no matter how we feel about history, most of us are moving on.
Sure, we’ll miss the paper when it’s gone. We’ll show our grandchildren stacks of yellowed scraps and explain the laborious process by which we wrote our material, sent it to the editor, then waited several days while it was checked and proofed, typeset and laid out, printed, cut and folded, distributed to kids on bikes, and tossed on the step like a gift.
And then we’ll shake loose the cobwebs, log on, and tune in.
