It is the daily pileup, delivered by someone I never see but sometimes hear when I am awake early, a light thump! that is as good an indicator as anything going on in the sky that dawn is about to come. There it is, the daily paper, and I know I will sound like an old fart here when I write that it is how I prefer to get the day’s news even though once in a while the plastic bag is soaked through with spring rains and I have to separate the pages and hang them by the stove, or periodically there has been one of those printing or folding problems and a column of type has an annoying crease running through it that makes a story hard to read.
But why the primitive wad of newsprint at a time when it’s so easy to pull out a phone or tablet or this same laptop on which I’m writing this and find all the same stories, without getting my fingers dirty, and with the accompaniment of fabulous video clips and galleries of color photos and fancy Google maps that allow me to zoom in and out and find out exactly where a place in the news is and what it looks like from a satellite?
You’d think that someone who has hugged a fair number of trees through the years wouldn’t choose the technology that requires that they be cut down for a highly temporary use.
You’d think that someone who prefers a tidy house would spurn the medium that results in small stacks of newsprint piling up in various rooms because I might want to refer back to that one item in the business news, and there’s a recipe that looks appealing in the midweek food section, and the travel and magazine sections with their meandering stories about wandering on foot through Finland or some cranky guy who spent decades tracking down a buried treasure make the best bathroom reading.
I might say that I like the paper because I dislike the lure of electronics, especially when we’re sitting down to eat, because I have seen in the cafes and cafeterias far too many tables full of aloof friends all consumed in the black holes of their respective screens.
I might say that I like the paper because there simply is no better way to read the morning funnies than to have them spread out on a page the way they always have been since they were invented more than a century ago, as a way to sell newspapers.
I might say that it’s all about the unexpected juxtapositions or eye-catching photos that lead me to stuff I’d never seek out myself, like the story about the unlikely sport of cup-stacking (really, you can Google it).
But all of this would miss the main point, which is that I like newspapers mainly because you can throw the damn things away, or, more appropriately, place them thoughtfully in the recycling bin. It is the finite nature of the newspaper that is its main appeal—at least, that is its lure in this modern era when we have all learned that our screens are an opening to something endless. Every smartphone, every tablet is “Infinity in the palm of your hand,” as the eccentric poet William Blake wrote more than two centuries ago (today, he’d be a hardcore blogger).
Which is a wonderful, powerful thing, of course. But it reminds me often of how when I worked in the office of a weekly newspaper I grew disturbed at how all our work was so tied to the future: What were the deadlines for next week? Was the copy coming in on time? What should go in the events calendar? And then somehow we’d pull the thing together and each Thursday it hit the stands, fresh for the readers but already a stale thing, an artifact of the past, for those of us who’d worked on it.
There was little of the present in the paper for me, in other words—what we worked on moved almost instantaneously from future to past.
Our electronic media, on the other hand, exist in an eternal now, a ceaseless being that is finally as enervating as it is energizing. Maybe it is because I’m a journalist that I am so fond of limits, of word counts, of deadlines, and so I’m ultimately appalled by a medium that knows no limits whatsoever.
When I’ve read election returns this spring on Wednesday mornings, I’ve done so mindful that what I’m reading at the breakfast table in black and white is probably already out of date in our 24/7 era. But I don’t care. I want the important news of the world—and of the town—wrapped up, summarized, and then it is with great satisfaction that I can happily put this encapsulated past into the recycling bin, feeling ready to step into the unmediated present.
