A newspaper junkie's lament

OK, I'll admit it. I am a newspaper junkie.

Ever since I was five, one of my favorite moments of every day has been sitting down at my kitchen table and reading the newspaper. Growing up in Pittsburgh, we subscribed to the afternoon paper - the long-departed Pittsburgh Press. I couldn't wait until the paperboy (another long-lost image) came to our front door, pulled open the screen door, dodged our wildly barking dog, and threw the paper into our front foyer. 

My first stop has always been the sports pages. I've always loved reading the stories and box scores from baseball and basketball games, and imagining how the game had gone. In 1970s Pittsburgh, following the Pirates and Steelers was a sports lover's dream - reading about Clemente and Stargell, Bradshaw and Mean Joe Greene brought the images on the TV screen or the playing field to life. I learned complex addition and multiplication and division by adding up the box scores, running the stats for my favorite teams or players, and coming up with my own statistical permutations.  

As my horizons grew, so did my time with the paper. I graduated from sports and comics to news and opinion and finally to business and features. Each step of the way, I learned more about my community and the world, and I improved my own reading and writing skills.

The growth of the internet has only fueled my newspaper obsession. No longer do I have to find the papers at a newsstand - I can get the news on my computer, read only what I want, and have access to a wide range of opinions and stories. Today, I find myself checking out local and national papers through news aggregators or via RSS feeds - there is virtually no limit to what you can get.

So why the long story about my love affair with newspapers?

Well, here in Philadelphia, our region's newspapers are facing significant financial difficulties. Both Philadelphia Media Holdings (publisher of the Inquirer, Daily News, and Philly.com) and the Journal Register Co. (publisher of the Delaware County Times, West Chester Daily Local, Norristown Herald, and other regional daily and weekly papers) have both filed for bankruptcy in recent months. Major newspapers across the country are facing similar challenges - threatening to stop publishing daily papers, moving to more online services, and even considering closing outright.

Newsrooms have shrunk; there is more reliance on news services, meaning that more and more different papers are looking more and more the same. No longer do I get different takes from the Inquirer and the Bucks County Courier on national news - they both rely increasingly on the AP for their national news. This feeds an echo chamber of sorts, where the same stories get repeated over and over, and national news and trends can outweigh local insight and differences. Smaller groups of writers or commentators get outsized influence, leading to a narrowing of the range of opinion and a movement to the extremes on all sides.

Nationally, people are starting to recognize that the newspaper as we have long known it will cease to exist unless dramatic changes are enacted. TIME magazine recently ran a cover story on how to save newspapers, and the newspaper industry itself has begun an advertising campaign - in newspapers - to show their own importance.

But are we too late? A recent Pew Research Center survey says that few Americans, and even fewer young people, would care if newspapers ceased to exist. Only 33% of all Americans surveyed, and 23% of Americans between 18 and 39 years of age, would miss newspapers a lot if they weren't around. Increasingly, they get their news from TV or the web, and there are concerns about the quality of the papers.

It seems to me that we are facing a circular problem. We get more of our news - for free - from the internet and TV; however, most of internet and TV news stories come from newspaper reporting or wire services. Newspaper newsrooms have shrunk because of declining readership and advertising, limiting content and quality. But readership and advertising are down because fewer people are reading papers.

Even I am part of the problem. The more papers I read online, the more articles I link to for free, the more difficult it is for papers to survive. Why pay for the news if you can get it for free?

So what will happen if we lose papers? Will we lose all the news? Are TV networks and websites ready to step up and provide reporting of the depth and level of good newspaper journalism? Locally, will TV and radio spend the resources and time to provide residents with the details behind budget proposals, the facts behind trial testimony, and investigations into public corruption? Can blogs and websites provide the depth and diversity of analysis that newspaper columnists and editorial writers provide?

And maybe the bigger question for a junkie like me - where will I be able to get my fix of news, sports, and comics to get my day started?

-- Steve Wray, Executive Director