Paper and Ink

It’s not the normal image that comes to mind when one reminisces about their childhood, but for me, ever-present in many of my most dominant childhood memories is the newspaper. Specifically, it’s the sports page of the Chicago Tribune.

My grandmother lived the first 60 years of her life in Chicago, and till she died at 88 she still held on to her beloved city through a subscription to the Tribune. The paper had a spot on a footstool near the table where she sat and watched traffic all day. When I was 10, I started reading the sports page every day, and my grandmother began putting it aside special for me, saving days worth if I couldn’t make it by for a day or two or was out of town.

On those occasions when I was away for a few days I would spend a not-so-small portion of the drive home in excited anticipation of the stack of sports pages awaiting me. A box of donuts, stack of bills, or slate of new GI Joe figurines couldn’t excite me more than those outdated sports pages.

I’d spend my idle time throughout the school day pining for the paper, wondering if there would be a good picture of Michael Jordan on the front page or how Bernie Lincicome would rip the Bears or what Sam Smith would write about Jordan, Scottie Pippen, and the Bulls.

Back in those pre-Internet, pre-cable (at least in Egg Harbor) days, I also relied on the paper to find out who won last night’s games, who scored what, and who the latest league leaders were (I especially loved the days when the Trib would print season stats for every team, which would take up two pages and keep me occupied for hours. No, I’m serious, hours. I was a bit of a dork).

Even today, when I think of holidays, memories are conjured of lying on my grandmother’s gold shag carpeting, pouring over the paper as a couple dozen family members scurried over me to prepare for the feast.

The aroma of turkey and stuffing waging a battle in my mind against the smell of a day-old newspaper. After a couple years devoted solely to the sports page my little sister (though two years my junior, she was a bit more worldly than I) convinced me to branch out a little. She drew my attention to the Tempo section by feeding me Bob Greene’s columns about Michael Jordan, then his many works detailing the worst of wrongs done to children.

By high school I was fighting her for control of the whole paper, but just as I had fallen completely in love with the medium, it began to change.

The Internet arrived, ad revenue dropped, and soon the entire business was in flux. Now, the paper has become noticeably smaller, both in the size of the page and the number of them. The paper that once felt substantial, like something of value and importance in my hands, now carries the weight of a Sunday shopper insert. In some instances, it has about the same quality of content.

More and more that content is provided by wire services rather than beat reporters and correspondents. The voices and personalities of the dozens of reporters and columnists I once considered almost friends (albeit a very one-sided friendship) now limited to a select few.

Where once I could find a single issue covered from a different perspective in the Post-Crescent, Advocate, Press-Gazette and several more, I now get the same reporter’s take in each. It’s certainly not the fault of the reporter, and is maybe nobody’s at all, only another step in the evolution of the business. For large media conglomerates like the Tribune and Gannett it only makes good business sense.

This may not seem like much of an issue, until you consider something like coverage of the presidential campaign. Several prominent papers have added their masthead to the list of those who will not assign a reporter to the campaign, instead relying on syndicated stories to provide a glimpse.

This means that a candidate has fewer questions to answer, and fewer chances to be asked a critical question, and fewer perspectives to consider. The electorate is done a disservice, and ever more each year is left with lazy journalism focused on the campaign and dollar figures and less on the substance of the candidates.

It’s not entirely due to computers or the Internet or corporatization – writers were lamenting the merging of and dwindling number of newspapers as early as the 1960s – but the pace seems to have quickened. The Internet now gives us the ability to get exactly the information we want whenever we want it, a great tool indeed. But it also means we don’t stumble across something we never knew we were looking for, a perspective, or a photo, or an obituary that pulls us in by chance as we flip through a couple dozen pages of section 1.

Anyone involved in journalism has to question the direction it’s headed, and can only hope the Internet grows into a medium that will provide the questioning role our democracy so heavily depends on.

Maybe it will. Maybe through blogs and the airing of a wider range of voices it can provide that service even better than the traditional media has. But even if it does, something will be lost in the transition – that feel of a paper in your hands, the world at your fingers.

And for some of us, the satisfying anticipation of a sports page waiting for you on the newsstand at the market, the gas station, or in some cases, on a footstool.