Read all About It!

I love newspapers - I love the look of them and the feel of them and even the smell of them. They are not like a book or a magazine because they are something unique and different and are meant to be read in a different way. Newspapers open up to you, they enfold you and let you get right inside them.

Some people just like to randomly peruse a newspaper and then discard it all over the living room floor (Julie?) but I am pretty disciplined when it comes to the newspaper ritual. I like my newspaper neat and folded and I have to read it the way it was printed - front to back, section by section. If an article starts in section A and is continued in section D - I don't jump ahead, I will have to read the rest of it when I get there.

Some people prefer the sports pages or the editorials or even (God forbid) the obituaries - to each his own. But the comics are the part of the paper I look forward to the most. What kind of a world would it be without Dagwood, Snoopy, Dilbert and Garfield?

Even though I love newspapers I can also see the wastefulness of them in that they use up so many trees to bring us the news that we can easily get on TV or on the internet. And don't forget the huge cost of physically distributing newspapers all over the planet every single day - a monumentally wasteful enterprise! It costs more and more to produce and distribute newspapers so they sell and print more advertising thereby exacerbating the problem. It makes me angry to see so many supplements in the paper every day. That used to be something associated with Christmas shopping but now it is pretty much year round. The newspapers are in trouble and ironically they seem to be contributing to their own demise.

I fear the newspaper as we know it will not be around for much longer. It is a ritual and a comfort that is destined to become a relic of the past. I don't want to see that but I also don't want to see vast resources wasted. Recycling may be part of the answer but I don't think that is enough. I think they have to concentrate on keeping the newspaper focused on what is was intended to do - deliver the news. Of course there has to be some advertising material but that needs to be controlled. However, I am not naive - I know this trend will continue and that newspapers will continue to grow and bloat until they implode and we ultimately we will be forced to read our daily news on a shiny plastic tablet. Probably better for the planet but personally, I will miss that tactile connection that only comes from ink and shredded trees.

So I plan to continue reading newspapers as long as they continue to print them and I hope that is a long time. The day will probably come when they are just a remnant of the past but I hope I am a remnant of the past by that time too. And in case you are wondering what Dagwood is up to these days - have a look....

http://www.blondie.com/strip.php?month=10&year=2010&comic=2010-10-2