Losing the local newspaper: the end or something else?
I’ve lived in many different sized towns over the past sixty years or so. Some have been quaint. Some have not. Each one has a unique characteristic so different from another that makes it a small town. Yes, they have all shared some characteristic. Main street is called Main Street. Locations are often described with “that’s the place where”. Only those who live or have lived there would understand and find them easily. The locals just know.
This town today is slowly changing. The changes would perhaps be unnoticed by the residents. They just need to stop and look – not glance – at the landscape and environment around. The differences seem to be just the “natural” progression of things; the march of time, inevitable. But they are profound differences; once these changes have occurred, some things may never, never be noticed.
It all starts with the newspaper. The local paper, once seen as the prime connection to the people, places and events of the community has changed; remember the garage sale sections, the personal section that let you know who visited whom, guests visiting; birthdays, anniversaries, lost pets. The paper now has lost, for me, the local-ness. It seems more like a mash-up (from the contemporary vernacular) that is not local. Articles were cut out and put on the refrigerator door, or mailed, passed to friends; the article was a tangible part of many lives. In several scrapbooks or picture albums, I have kept an article; to remind me, to connect me. Before smart phones and social media kept us plugged in constantly, updating this or that, life was different, easier, slower. Now it is a screenshot of an image.
I can remember setting on the front porch watching the world and the day process in front of my eyes. I would read the paper; front page had the really important things; obituaries to let me see how many I knew; food inspections to know where to buy groceries and where to get a bite to eat; police blotter; letters to the editor; editorial written by a name I knew and about a subject here; classified ads; local sports scores, highlights. The local paper was local. Pictures of local people. Pictures of local places. The paper was a daily. I even knew who delivered it, and had a pretty good idea when it would be delivered. Setting on the front porch with a cup of coffee was how my days started. Neighbor up the street was up around the same time I was up, cup of coffee in hand. Some mornings he waved at me. Some mornings I would walk up to his place and we would have a cup of coffee, and solve all the problems of the world. If you have lived in a small town, you will understand. ; not respond and react to everything thrown in our way, every hour and every minute. We were updated once a day, with the paper; not with the status updates, the barrage of text messages.
As the paper slowly starts loosing subscribers to the digital always on, forever updating, raging flow of information and images, the joy of reading the physical paper is gone. Advertising dollars are in flux. The delivery arm is morphed from small routes (remember the paper boys, on bicycles, with the bags of papers precariously perched on handle bars) to larger routes with hundreds of newspapers to be delivered, to postal delivery where the news becomes history, we all know that same day delivery will typically not be the norm.
The local paper is transformed into an amalgamation of seemingly random pieces from newsfeeds that are problematic to connect to the LOCAL viewpoint. Is a piece from the other side of the state, or even more than 100 miles away something that I can see as relevant? Probably not. When columns penned by reporters you know and see around town are replaced by news outlets where you know no one, the local paper has become irrelevant. Now, just a piece of a collection at the local library archives.
When dry cleaners start out-sourcing their work to a cleaner one hundred miles away, and finding a drycleaner locally this town is changing right in front of our eyes and we haven’t even noticed.
When the old buildings are seen as inadequate for use today are demolished to give more green spaces, our connection to our collective past is replaced by the latest technologically and hippest confluence of consultants and capital improvement. The craftsmen and their precision, the social and cultural importance of the materials, the integration of the physical structure into this place are replaced by an aesthetically neutral or incongruous thing that will never last as long as what it replaced.
The old just doesn’t work; we are compelled in some way to make our mark on things, rather than study and learn or relearn how to live in the present.
The coming reformation?
A reformation is not a revolution. A reformation does more than simply acknowledge our past. It provides us something to reshape, not replace, buildings, structures, functions and parts of our neighborhood and our town. This reshaping creates something that is a community. It grows and looks forward.
So, the local paper may become a weekend edition and mid-week edition. Might even find the paper part of conversations again. Might even be part of the reformation of a local town. Perhaps.
Connections to a life and more 