Print newspapers may be dying, but they’re not dead yet — and neither are their readers, I’m pleased to report.
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 certainly 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 newspaper I want downtown at a much more reasonable hour.
But why do I want a printed newspaper at all, when it’s so much easier to read news online? Because I still like reading on actual paper, and 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 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 spent on the ferry commuting to my newspaper job across the water from Seattle, when I read the Post-Intelligencer cover-to-cover. Not just because I was a captive audience, but because that paper featured 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 stopped printing, still lives on. Just as many say a person doesn’t truly die until the last person who knew them dies, I say that print newspapers aren’t dead as long as people like me are here to remember them — that even if everyone stopped printing newspapers tomorrow, they won’t be dead until everyone who loves them dies.
So print is not dead, long live print.
Justine: your letter is a most eloquent paean to the death of printed material. Ha ha, just kidding. I LOVE newspapers, books, magazines, zines, etc. in print…rich with history that goes way back to Gutenberg, and even beyond. The feel upon my fingers, the reassuring weight in my hands, the smell of old books, the transformation of a blank page tabula rasa into sometimes astounding revelations. However, due to living in a small space and occasional bedbug issues I’ve had to discard my humble physical library and switch almost entirely to the electronic version. And thank Glob for that!