Extra! Maybe you won't be able to read all about it

"All I know is what I read in the papers."

- Humorist Will Rogers

I can go on line and tap into any newspaper anywhere in the world. That is a wonderful thing. If I want to know the local spin on what is happening in London, New York, Paris or Tel Aviv, then I can be there in a trice.

The technology of access today is a marvel. It’s also increasingly exponentially and an almost terrifying pace. It’s excellent at all levels.

Except the consumer one. Especially for a consumer past a certain age who is steeped in habits that while they may seem antediluvian to techno-trendies, nevertheless constitute the person I am.

I mention this because I am aghast at what is happening to newspapers all over this continent and elsewhere in the world. The forces of ‘evil’, both technology and the marketplace, are killing them. This has nothing to do with not being moderately current with what there is, but I’m having difficulty with the idea of the printed journalistic page being relegated to some sort of fashion-dictated rubbish bin.

There are many factors leading to the demise of newspapers, including high production costs, newsprint costs (which are massive), levels of pay, union-dictated featherbedding of employees who should be redundant, loss of advertising revenue to television and the Internet, and loss of readership.

In the last while a number of papers have folded in the US and Canada and I couldn’t begin to list them all, but the 150-year-old Rocky Mountain News out of Denver is publishing its last issue on Friday, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, nearly as old, packed it in last spring, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is on its last legs and under serious threat are the Hartford Courant, the Baltimore Sun, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. In Canada Canwest News Services, which publishes dailies in Vancouver, Victoria, Edmonton, Calgary and a few other spots is gazillions in debt with little hope of rising from the burden.

At the end of it all, maybe I am a relic of an earlier era. To me my news must come from the journals I browse every morning and night. I want ink on my fingers and I want to read stories at my leisure, in my living room, with a cup of coffee. I don’t want to read news stories of my computer at my fucking desk. I mean, I call up papers for research or information, but not for leisurely perusal. That is a different process.

And, I am old-fashioned in that regard and I resent the fact that a post-literate generation – products of hi-tech, crappy schools with diminished standards and stunningly ill-informed teachers – should be dictating change in society. Do I overstate? Probably. But, it’s my blog and I can do that. I can also say snarky things about teachers, since I used to be one and I know that I am not maligning good teachers, and there are such pedagogues, blessedly.

Yet, how many homes today get a daily paper? I will suggest a fraction of those that did 20, 30 or 50 years ago. And, the kids out of J-school, what are their journalistic aspirations? Television or some aspect of the electronic media. How many kids want to do newspaper work? Not much calling for ink-stained wretches nowadays. I grieve for that.

While not exactly in my dotage, I began my journalist career with a manual typewriter and turned out copy that would actually be proofread by people who knew how to string two words together. IN the papers of yore, not only were the scribes literate, everybody in the place was in pre-spellcheck days. That archaic process was only in the late 1970s, and it continued until the late 1980s, when we go our first archaic and unreliable word processors.

Anyway, cannot stand in the way of ‘progress’. I don’t even want to. Have all your hi-tech stuff, and I indeed have mine and wouldn’t be without it, but I wish you’d had the decency to leave me my newspapers.