Today was Sunday. When I got to work I followed my usual routine – I grabbed the paper and started carving it up. I took what I always take: Opinion, Life & Arts (for the crossword puzzles, mainly), and the comics.
After having read the opinion pages, finished my puzzles, and caught up with Frazz, I started thinking about why it was that a self-proclaimed “news junkie” like me didn’t lunge immediately for the front page. As it happened, I had looked it over briefly – and saw nothing I hadn’t already seen that morning on my habitual perusal of the web – MSNBC.com, King5.com, Newsweek.com, et al.
While I am something of a traditionalist and don’t mean to in any way belittle the special feeling of snapping open a paper – getting one’s hands dirty, both literally and figuratively, in pursuit of the latest – it does occur to me that what I’m reading there anymore isn’t very often the… well, latest. I don’t think there’s any way to fix this, really – As best I can tell, the future of the traditional print newspapers rests with people like me, who just enjoy the sort of ceremony and ritual that comes with reading the paper.
After all this pondering, it should be noted, I went back and read the whole thing (save some of the more boring bits). Maybe the papers will survive not by virtue of a love of tradition but by an overdeveloped sense of guilt.
Cheers!
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