No more papers

It’s been two to three weeks now without a paper waiting in the driveway in the morning darkness. I can’t remember a time without the daily paper, the “Inky,” the Philadelphia Inquirer. Before home delivery out here in the ‘burbs, I used to pick up an Inky every day at 30th Street Station when we lived in the city. We’re talking a daily fix for a quarter century, at least.

But what with the recession and a substantial decrease in my salary, the family accountant, my wife Suze, red-lined the $136 twice-a-year payment for the Inky. I agreed without much thought. The Inky has been backsliding for years with less original and shallower reporting. Just yesterday it filed for bankruptcy. Also, the news is so relentlessly downbeat you need some distance from it. “The worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.” “Millions forced from their homes.” Consumer spending down. Food spending, housing prices, the Dow, corporate earnings, all down, down, down. “The U.S. Federal Reserve said this week that the recession could last five years.” “A healthcare crisis and the planet on the brink of incineration.” This recession is absolutely accelerating the great migration from print; it certainly forced the issue in our household. Gone, too, are magazine subscriptions, one by one as they expire. Lost to attrition in the last few years have been The New Yorker, American Cinematographer, The Oxford American, The Progressive, The Sun, Newsweek, ESPN, Adbusters, Entertainment Weekly, The Hollywood Reporter, and surely others I can’t recall.

Gone also are the days, just about every day, when I’d get a turkey or tuna sandwich at the Valley Forge Deli and with it two or three papers, usually The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Philadelphia Daily News (aka the Daily Nuisance). Last time Sean at the deli rang up The Wall Street Journal it was $2.25. Even he did an exaggerated double-take. “$2.25? Is that right? Is that what it’s up to now? You know, we only make two or three cents per paper. The papers aren’t a good business. They’re dying.”

Join the funeral procession, Sean. It’s a long line mourning the passing of papers, and to a lesser extent, at least so far, magazines. I didn’t imagine it coming to this, myself and thousands of other journalists. But I’m referring here to giving up my addiction to print. I’ve been a newspaper and magazine junkie my entire adult life. Newsstands, the old school wooden sheds and narrow stores crammed with cigars, water bottles, post cards, lottery ticket signs and the kind of quirky, in-depth variety of papers and magazines usually only found on big city street corners or in college campus towns, always have been one of my guilty pleasures. That’s where, if you’re fortunate, you’d find The Times of London, London’s Guardian and Observer, Daily Telegraph and Daily Mirror, the Financial Times, the weekly Variety, and expensive and often short-lived dazzling niche mags like Beach Culture (long gone) for surfers and Doubletake (long gone) for photography and essays and 4c — color, couture, curiosity, culture (which I’ve only come across in southern California). And maybe, if the racks are long and deep enough, there will be a section for small personal “zines” like Survivalism by an Iraqi vet, Four-Hundred Word, a square little digest of short non-fiction, Reality Ranch, “a forum for humor writing,” and Sufism, the issue I bought containing a letter from the editor titled, “Intention and Expectation in Pursuing a Mystical Path.”

I bought all those zines at Powell’s bookstore in Portland, Oregon, which takes up an entire city block and bills itself as the world’s largest independent bookstore. I can’t tell you most hotels I stayed at or the restaurants I ate at when on the road for business or vacations, but I clearly can picture favorite newsstands in Santa Monica, Princeton, Boulder, Seattle, Chicago, Denver, Toronto, Manhattan, Newark, Delaware and Penn’s campus in Philadelphia. At any airport I’d search out the nearest newsstand before coffee or checking my flight. Always purchase the local paper. Far preferable to the free, homogenized, sanitized USA Today lying in the hotel hallway in the morning. Give me local color, local columnists, classic Herb Caen, god rest his soul, in the San Francisco Chronicle and Steve Lopez in the LA Times to name two, local heroes and villains, high school sports scores, the Chicago Trib and Sun-Time’s sports pages, the Dallas Morning-Herald’s sports, the Boston Globe’s sports, exotic LA Times coverage of Malibu brush fires and show biz, The Washington Post’s political reporting, even the crap, bland papers in Vegas, Orlando and Miami. Always good for passing time in trains, planes and nights propped up on pillows in hotel rooms.

Now magazines and newspapers fall under the miscellaneous category in our suddenly scrutinized family budget, a surely bloated monthly number ripe for spending cuts. And so it’s time for print withdrawal. Surrendering the print habit is somewhat disorienting at first (Sunday mornings with time on your hands is a test), but actually easier than I would’ve thought. Which has to be another nail in the coffin of “old media” publishing, because if a dedicated addict who mainlined black ink like me can give it up almost overnight, I can’t see who wouldn’t be able to.

It’s the alternate universe of the Internet that allows the transition from print to be as painless as I’ve found it. Of course there would be no transition from print if not for the Internet’s endless offerings. I’ve simply bookmarked many of the aforementioned newspapers and magazines and click on them for a quick look-see at the end my day in front of the computer. I know more about what’s going on in the Swat Valley in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province than in my own backyard now. I’m too lazy, or my eyes are too strained by five o’clock, to look up the local papers’ web sites. And I’m not all that concerned about sewer expansion plans, another accident on Route 422, a bomb threat at a middle school or a small-time meth ring.

No doubt dropping the morning Inky has made me a less informed citizen. I have more knowledge of the fortunes of the British Premier League football team Everton than my son Steve’s Methacton High basketball conference standing. I know more about California’s budget crisis than Philadephia’s. I can delve into more detail describing to you why the Tennessee Vols’ new football coach is pissing off every Southeast Conference opponent in recruiting wars than what the Phillies manager is saying about spring training and the upcoming season. And I have no idea what times movies start at the mult-plex five minutes from my front door. Suze tells me the Oscars are on tonight. I had an inkling but that’s all. Suze listens to NPR all day and then gets 22 minutes of news read to her by Katie Couric at 6:30 in the evening. I can listen to music but not NPR speak while I work, and I can’t stomach all the drug ads that break up Katie’s teleprompter recitation.

I’ve retreated from print, but not paper. Due to the strain and uneasy ergonomics of reading more than a hundred words on the screen, I waste good timber and run through ink cartridges printing out articles to read later in the evening on a couch. The “Net enables me to come up with my own custom newspaper each day, lets me be the editor and select or censor stories. I read what I want to read. And I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not.