In defense of newspapers

Thirty years ago last month, I began my association with what was then the Daily Evening Item. Now it's simply The Daily Item.

I bring this up not to seek accolades, but to comment that much has changed in our industry since that Tuesday morning in 1979 when I walked into the second-floor newsroom to begin what has been an enriching and rewarding career at the paper.

In 1979, newspapers still held the upper hand in the gathering and dissemination of information, although television was – and in some cases still is – an unwelcome intrusion into the world of serious journalism. Even then, print people despised the “mike jockeys” as “rip and readers” whose only attributes were their voices and their looks.

Today, of course, the print medium – judging from the depressing advertising and circulation figures we’re seeing daily – would appear to be pretty far down the list of preferred news sources. There was no internet in 1979, and therefore no explosion of free, easy, and often glaringly biased information tailored to fit the political slant of just about everyone who has an opinion.

We are what we’ve always been … a slow-moving industry (printing once a day in an age of lightning-fast dissemination of news tends to paint you with that brush) that, while flawed by natural human imperfections, still holds to a uniform set of standards and is still bound by a uniform set of laws. And while there are some serious and responsible blogs on the web, it’s also true that, for the most part, internet postings are impervious to the types of checks and balances that at least attempt to keep the print medium fair.

Newspapers aren’t dead, but their print editions are in trouble. It’s likely that if you added the number of editions sold and the number of hits papers get on their websites (and this is especially true for papers that update their sites frequently) one could conclude the industry is as healthy as it ever was.

But that doesn’t explain why papers such as the Chicago Tribune and the Boston Globe are reeling, and why other papers have shut down their print editions entirely. I will leave it to those with far more expertise in the business side than me to explain that!

We stand to lose something very valuable if newspapers are to fall victim to the Information Age. And I’m not talking about the eradication of democracy as we know it (I don’t like that argument very much, frankly).

Of course, it’s true that a good newspaper holds the powerful accountable (often to the chagrin of the powerful and their allies). But whatever flaws there may be in the internet’s ability to be restrained and responsible, holding the powerful accountable is well within its capabilities.

But newspapers have other purposes. Even with a laptop and wireless, eating breakfast with your computer can be cumbersome. Eating it with the paper spread out in front of you is saner, neater and far less expensive if you spill your cereal or get crumbs all over the place.

Joking aside, I got into this business, and gravitated toward newspapers, because I always saw them as communities unto themselves. They were one-stop shopping vehicles where you could find out what was going on in your communities, find out who died, who got arrested, which local teams won, what was playing at the local theaters, which store was selling hamburg at five percent off, and what was on TV tonight. At the same time, you could clip coupons, do the crossword, play bridge and even chess, do word puzzles, check box scores and standings.

And best of all, you could do all of the above in some degree of comfort and with absolutely no pressure to be technologically current.

I’m sure someone from every generation has said this, but it’s doubly true now: this is a terrifyingly fast, impersonal age. Advances in technology happen faster than most of us can fathom, and there’s more and more pressure to either keep up with them or fall hopelessly behind.

The pace may be slower with newspapers, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Even with things changing a mile a minute, it’s necessary sometimes to digest, and to process. It’s also necessary to preserve and remember.

Newspapers give you something you’ll never find on the internet: A daily snapshot of life. Years from now, you can go back to an edition from The Item, and get a pretty accurate picture of what life was like on that day. It would really, really be a shame to sacrifice that for the convenience of staring at life through a monitor.