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Sat 2024-09-21 16:13 EST
When I was a kid in the late 80s and 90s, my parents would always get the newspaper and read it every day. I imagine they still do. I grew up near Augusta, GA, so we got the Augusta Chronicle. Of course, when I was very young, all I cared about was reading the comics page, and even before I learned to read I loved looking at the pictures. This has led to a lifelong fascination with newspaper comics, which you can probably guess by looking at the front page of my capsule or anything I've put on the web.
As I grew older, I got into more and more of the sections. I remember in high school being most interested in the opinion page. I liked the editorial cartoons, of course, but I also really liked reading the editorials and the letters to the editor. To me, it felt more real than the rest of the paper, because everything else was written in the objective, dispassionate style of most journalism. On the opinion page people actually said how they felt about the news, and what it really meant to them, and how it affected them. That was more interesting to me than the rest. I enjoyed the lifestyle sections, too, because they just seemed more fun and interesting and not as stuffy as the rest of the paper.
When I was a teenager, I discovered that in order to read the paper at the speed I wanted, and read all the sections I wanted, it was easier to just read the previous day's paper every day, because no one else would be reading it. My parents caught on to this and thought it was quite clever, and besides, it meant I wouldn't be bothering them to get the paper they were reading.
These days, I care the most about local news sections, because I like to know what's going on in the area around me. It's not hard to know what's happening in the world, or in the nation. You don't have to really seek it out. You just have to interact with people, or just use the internet in any way, and you'll find out. But local news is a bit harder to find, unless you live in a very large city.
It's a shame that newspapers are no longer that common anymore. I have a subscription to my local paper, but only the digital edition. I wanted to get the print edition, but besides being more expensive, the print edition is only two days a week around here. Also, from what I've seen, it's mostly just national news and sports, and not much of what I'm really interested in. The local stories are only in the digital edition, which is odd. There's a nice app to read all of it in, and it includes all the comics, too. The digital edition even has more comics than the print one does. But I still miss the physical newspaper. It was always nice to just have it all spread out on the table and read it, or open it up all around you when you're sitting in a chair. I feel the same way about physical books: the tactile nature of a physical paper just makes it so much more satisfying to read. I like to be able to hold something and flip through it, whether it be newspapers, books, or magazines.
I recognize that production of these physical objects is costly and perhaps that will mean the number of them will continue to decline. But I hope not. I hope younger generations will discover the joy of reading a physical newspaper, and bring it back somehow. Digital devices are wonderful, but they just don't feel the same.
Newspapers was published on 2024-09-21