Newspaper not dead yet

Letting Freedom Ring
September 30, 2014
State’s schools got roped into U.S. border crisis
September 30, 2014
Letting Freedom Ring
September 30, 2014
State’s schools got roped into U.S. border crisis
September 30, 2014

A lot of people say its day has come, the daily or weekly visitor to your home which, in a way that television or radio can never do, allows you to touch, with your hands, the travesties of the world or the joys of the next town over.

Don’t write the obituary yet.


Yes, some might be surprised that there is such a thing still as National Newspaper Week. Why not National Buggy Whip Week, or Tallow Candle Month?

Nope. Bad comparisons.

From the time some guy in a cave chiseled words on a tablet (the stone kind) the methods of information delivery have always changed. And despite technological advances, which allow information to show up on our phones or tablets (the electronic kind) — which are all very good things — the feel of paper in the hands, the smell of the print, for some of us these are all still welcome.


Sitting in a barbershop and want to know what happened at a game you haven’t caught up with?

There’s the newspaper, dog-eared and trusty, waiting for you to scan.

We don’t have subways here. But in big cities that do, it is impossible to believe that people will easily give up their daily tabloid.


Want to show your neighbors how erudite you are? Leave a copy of The Times on the coffee table. What they see might surprise them.

There is a sense of permanency to the printed word, words on paper that yellows over time, showing the age and importance of the subject matter that caused it to be saved, to be cherished, because it isn’t all just information, it is a carrier that is itself a living thing which ages, withers and sometimes disintegrates.

In the movie and stage play Newsies — a grand musical indeed — the reporter character Bryan Denton tells the ragamuffin newsboy crew that if the newspaper doesn’t say it happened, it didn’t happen. And somehow, considering the hodgepodge of online information that is often outright wrong, his assessment might still hold true.


So celebrate this special week by buying a newspaper, if you wish.

And remember, you can’t eat crawfish or crabs off of a an I-Pad.