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| Celebrating a Niners win with a newspaper! |
In fact, there’s enough people that still read actual newspapers that I often lose out to them when I want to treat myself to a copy of the New York Times. Like one Saturday when my husband and I embarked on a quest to buy one, but found every copy sold out at every store we visited.
That was cool.
Why? Because even though I came home without a newspaper to read that day, I loved learning that there are plenty of other people who still want them, including another couple who was far more dedicated to their purchase than my husband and I were.
“They take turns getting here at 5 a.m. to make sure they get a copy, one morning the husband is here, the next the wife is,” the manager of a Bay Area grocery store told me when I asked how many copies they stock: “Five, and they go fast.”
I don’t know why that couple was so determined to get a newspaper, as I wasn’t getting up before dawn to track them down and ask, but I loved learning that they exist, and still smile every time I think about them.
I also loved learning how many avid newspaper fans live in my hometown of Santa Cruz, where the bookshop downtown stocks nine copies of the daily NYT and 40 of the Sunday edition, “and we sell out every day,” the manager told me.
Best of all, though, is how many newspaper fans are in Ukiah, because there are just enough that I can usually find a copy of the NYT at our downtown bookshop without getting up before the sun.
But why do I want a printed newspaper at all, when it’s so much easier to read news online? Well, I need a break from screens, for one, but mostly it’s because I love newspapers. Print
journalism is not only my chosen profession, it is a craft I admire,
done by people I admire.
And why the NYT? Because I enjoy it, have ever since it was assigned to me as required reading for a journalism course in college. And, frankly, just like a chef who doesn’t care
to cook at home after working in the kitchen all day, I prefer sitting down to read a newspaper that I had absolutely no part in putting out.
Like
the mornings I rode the ferry to my newspaper job across
the water from Seattle, a commute I spent reading the Post-Intelligencer
cover-to-cover. Not just because I was a captive audience, but
because that paper featured of the best writers I've ever read, and I am
still sad that it stopped printing for good 15 years ago.
But for me, the P-I, and every other newspaper that has stopped printing, still lives on. Just as many believe that a person doesn’t truly die until the last person who knew them dies, I believe that print newspapers aren’t dead as long as people like me are here
to remember them. And even if everyone stopped printing newspapers tomorrow,
they won’t truly be dead until everyone who loves them dies.
Like me, and like this reader who wrote me recently:
“Two very solid human interest stories on today’s front page, thank you for sharing those pieces with the readers. The valor piece was especially noteworthy in depth and the soul factor.
I believe so much in having a local paper and I've been subscribing to the UDJ print version since the early 1990s. I still love print and the labor that goes into creating it.”
That was super cool.
So, for now, and many years to come, I declare that “print is not dead, long live print!”
And what’s even better than reading a newspaper? Watching one being printed!
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