Being a newspaper subscriber is kind of like owning a 15-year-old dog. You don’t know exactly when the experience is going to end, but you might want to hold off on buying another bag of kibble.
I am by no means a Luddite. I’m an avid Internet enthusiast and, in fact, earn much of my living writing for the Web. But I’m also a lifelong newspaper reader. You know, print newspapers. So when I hear talk of several cities possibly going “without a daily print paper by 2010” – and that the New York Times could respond to its financial struggles by shuttering my beloved Boston Globe – I get a little teary.
Now I’ll admit, the “newspaper-industry-is-dying” angle has been done to, well, death in recent years. As Slate.com’s Jack Shafer points out, “The only reason we’re so well-informed about journalists’ suffering is they have easy access to a megaphone.”
Nonetheless, I’m going to miss the old dinosaur. And my seven-month-old daughter has helped drive home this point by waking up at 5:30 each morning. I trudge down two flights of stairs, cranky baby in my arms, in the slim hope that my Globe will be resting on my front porch. It never is – not at that hour.
My only solution is to plop my laptop on the breakfast table and call up boston.com. But it’s just not the same. It’s no fun reading the comics. I can’t divvy up the reading with my wife – me, the sports; her, the front page. And every session is a dance with disaster, with my mug of coffee on one side of the laptop and a bowl of baby cereal on the other. (Not to mention the ever-present threat of baby spit-up.)
Yeah, I’m sounding like an old man. But I’m a loyal guy. And if that means going down with the sinking ship that is print newspapers, so be it.
Are you going to miss the ritual of the daily newspaper? Share your thoughts.
