Read all about it: Online or in the can
I was combing the Times looking for something serious to write about today when I came across this sentence buried in a story by one of my reporters:
“A man was arrested by village police on top of the town hall for masturbating naked in front of an apartment window next door.”
That's quite a to-do list this fella had: 1.) Get naked. Check. 2.) Get on top of a public building. Check. 3.) Masturbate in front of an apartment window. Check. 4.) Get arrested. Check.
This actually was a good plan if you take out the parts about standing on a public building in front of an apartment window and getting arrested. But I don't want to dwell on this guy's questionable decision-making skills. The point is I found this tidbit of information while reading a newspaper.
Combing a newspaper – unlike combing my hair – is something I am happy to say I am still able to do. You can buy a Watertown Daily Times, an Ogdensburg Journal or a Daily Courier-Observer in St. Lawrence County. You can turn the pages. You can spill your coffee on the front page and swear. You can always find a second-hand copy of one of St. Lawrence County's newspapers laying around the neighborhood diner.
The people in Ann Arbor, Mich., can no longer make such claims. They used to have a fine newspaper called the Ann Arbor News. For 174 years you could buy an Ann Arbor News to comb. And then all at once you couldn't. The owners cut out the cost of ink, paper and delivery by morphing the News into a Web site only product. You still get the news, but it's tough to wrap fish with it when you are done. My brother who lives in that area immediately called his sibling in the biz to vent.
“How can this happen? People like reading an honest-to-God paper newspaper, don't they? I mean, what's better than sitting down on Sunday morning with a cup of java and the paper?”
He was preaching to the paperboy. I told him to take his questions to his children who are in their 20s. They didn't grow up as we did checking the newspaper first thing in the morning to see if the Detroit Tigers won a game the night before. They checked the Internet on the night the game was played. They didn't check the obit page each day to see who died. They got text messages when there was a death they cared about. Technology has made life a lot more immediate – and newspapers, as much as I love them, have trouble keeping up. They are sadly becoming yesterday's news.
Who you are and how you act are learned behaviors. The people born well after my brother and I learned by hitting enter buttons instead of by turning pages. It's not that they have anything against newspapers, they just aren't as familiar to them as a keyboard and computer monitor or a cell phone. Newsprint and ink is familiar to people around my age. It's what we grew up with. It's what we know.
We move with the times and go online for our news more with every passing day, but we continue to hold on to our old school ways. Getting our news online is fine. It's fast. It's effecient. It's right now. But we still need that choice of having a newspaper that you can read when you're sitting on the can. One you can read without an Internet connection. Fewer communities each day are having that option.
The north country is so far bucking that national trend. We are not one of those places where the news is about the death of a newspaper. Naked guy partying with himself on top of Potsdam Town Hall grabs the headlines here. And you can read about it online or in the paper. It's still your choice.
