I must have been about seven or eight when I first became aware of a particular feature in the daily newspaper. At the time the paper wasn’t anything special to me, nor had I ever given it much thought; it was simply part of the firmament of the house where I grew up, no different than the rugs or chairs or layout of the rooms, all of which populated my early world in a manner that I would call unquestioned. Yet the daily paper, unlike those other items, was a focus of conversation. Where’s the paper? Do you have the paper? Is the paper in the kitchen? The paper would move from one room to the next, and could be found pretty much anywhere, a bit like the also perambulating and also black and gray house cat. In a remarkably short time, the paper that arrived with a crisp fold had a way of splitting into various sections, each one in a different room, the print smudged and ripped, all the folds now reversed.
Although calling it the paper seemed misleading. I knew how paper felt, and newsprint resembled something else, something distinct, not like the lined paper in my school notebooks, nor anything at all like the loose pages that I used to draw. The Niagara Gazette was slimmer, while the Buffalo News was more expansive. Both came out daily and ballooned to even larger sizes with color advertisements and a separate comic section on the weekends. Both had newsprint that was thin, almost transparent, and the pages tore with such ease; they both came tightly wrapped and with pages that were, occasionally, still warm from the printer; they were somehow oily, too, with the ink just as much on your fingers as on the pages. And you couldn’t lay a newspaper down and press it just anywhere, for it would leave, I learned, imprints of news stories on the table or, much worse, on the carpet. It wouldn’t be unusual—and this sounds ridiculous in today’s world—to wash your hands after reading the paper. Where exactly this peculiar form of paper came from, too thin, too flimsy, too oily, which you certainly couldn’t buy, wasn’t clear.
Our local paper had an evening edition, and I remember my father reading it most nights; my mother read the paper, too, but at times that were less predictable, in a manner that looked more spontaneous than planned. My father, I believe, read the paper from the first page to the last page like a book, while my mother bounced from article to article, she would jump between sections, or read just one section, until, later in the day, she would come back, ready to finish what she began hours earlier. I’m reasonably sure that neither of these observations are true, for I doubt that both the perceptual ability of my early years and the recall ability of my later years are accurate, though they happen to be what I do remember as true, which makes those memories indistinguishable from what’s actually true, in the same way that errors and lies and misleading news stories in the newspaper do, eventually, transform into facts by shaping reader belief.
My mother preferred, I believe, to read the newspaper at the kitchen table, where she could open an entire section and spread it flat along the wood, her eyes moving across multiple articles without needing to turn the page. When I picture that scene today, sunlight fills the kitchen, there’s a glow to the air, it is midday, there’s snow outside, or perhaps a warm breeze from the open window—which means that the picture that has solidified in my mind occurs on the weekend. Yet what’s most remarkable, to my eye at the time, is how she actually read. Paper was supposed to be crisp and clean, I had always assumed. It wasn’t marked or folded or stained. School textbooks were returned in pristine condition; library books, though already a tad worn, had the same requirement. But my mother had a very different, and rather startling, approach to the daily newspaper. She read with a pen. She wrote atop the articles. She used black ink for the crossword. And she possessed not the slightest compunction about scribbling, creasing, and, to my mind, defacing the news. A paper read by my mother came preprinted with supplementary words, lists, peculiar notes, and even an occasional phone number or appointment address in the margins. And if there just happened to be a large article-sized hole in the middle of the page, then my mother had already read the paper. You could also spot a preread paper by the presence of a fine, circular coffee stain on the right-hand pages, which I found, to be honest, incredible.
My father preferred to read in the living room, his feet raised, the paper held aloft, the sharp sound of creasing newsprint the signal of a turned page. I doubt these memories, too, as I find the picture that lingers in my mind too specific, and too consistent, for a scene that must have occurred thousands of times. What’s solidified is static, it is a particular image of my father reading, which makes me wonder if that picture simply distills all of those nights into their most essential components. And it doesn’t take too much stretching, I believe, to imagine that this picture can best be described as part of my early education, in how it distills what I observed over many years. Education, to my mind, comes much more from observation than from study, it is the consequence of how observation transforms into behavior, so what’s remembered doesn’t necessarily have to be true, and often isn’t, for it to fashion your future character. So what remains for me, this time, is a nighttime scene, a reading that takes place in the evening, which means that this picture occurs during the week. The windows are dark. There’s a glow from the lamp just above my father’s shoulder. And I see how the turning of one page reveals a giant hole in the paper, my mother having already removed a bit of news from our daily news, my father’s face now looking through the window of the missing article into the room. Thinking about it now I find it curious that these missing articles left no hints—they were simply redacted, perfectly sliced from the paper, without any sign of the lost subject. This wasn’t an idyllic moment in the world—as that’s never quite true—and it would be absurd to consider the newspaper the sole source of information, but there’s a certain totality to a lost article, to a lost puzzle piece in the common narrative for comprehending society.
My father also had an entire system for folding the newspaper. Half folds. Partial folds. Triplicate folds. Depending on where he read, or what section he read, he molded the paper for his purpose. For my eyes this was an intricate and mysterious but somehow still logical system. It was many years before I would learn that there’s a method for every newspaper. How a paper is read even hints toward the character of its audience. Not that long ago, you could still see a variety of daily papers on the subway in New York City, with The New York Times typically held aloft, or folded in halves, and taking up the most space; the New York Post arrives prefolded, its booklike shape designed for narrow spaces and crowded rooms, its giant headlines designed to be read from a distance; The Daily News, a rare sight on the subway but a common sight on commuter trains, forms an accordion, its shape disintegrating during the journey. A glance across a subway car could reveal a motley of papers, with each one offering hints of ideology, class, and location—three variables that, in most societies, are a tautology. There might even be a rough correlation between the ease with which you can fold a paper and political affiliation—especially when you think about the old broadsheets from Fleet Street in London, the regional papers that once dominated outside of Paris, or in the hodgepodge of daily papers in Italy. Some papers are printed with the knowledge that readers will skim them during a lunch break, or while falling asleep on a crowded train, and other papers are meant to be read in private clubs, or in large waiting rooms where nobody who is important ever has to wait. Expensive hotels still provide free daily papers; and in reasonably good hotels you can still find a collection of papers at the breakfast bar, which are usually wrapped around a peculiar wooden stick, for temporary use and with the requirement that you return them; of course the vast majority of hotels aren’t wasteful enough to stock any morning papers.
Although these are timeworn dynamics, of presses and printing and reporting, of the way in which narratives about whatever happens to be news begins to take shape in a society, these dynamics no longer conform to our world. Few travelers reach a new city and seek out a local paper today, just as few travelers reach a new city and look for a place to tie their horse. And it is rather banal to notice that how we read does, in some ways, seem to effect what we read, with the phone or tablet replacing the folded paper, with the character of an article that’s sent to a printing press different from the character of an article that appears on a screen. A reader from one hundred years ago would be perfectly capable of transporting ahead in time and absorbing the daily news from twenty years ago; a reader from just twenty years ago, however, might consider our contemporary environment more than a bit tricky. And they wouldn’t even be able to look across a subway car and assess the ideologies and affiliations of most passengers, with our ability to investigate and judge now limited by the secretiveness of our tiny devices.
During my early years my primary interaction with the paper was to occasionally carry it from one room to another when I was asked, although asking a seven year old to fold a paper has about the same success rate as asking a seven year old to put a map back neatly in the glovebox—to use an analogy from the same decade. Even though I don’t remember reading the paper, I still, somehow, absorbed fragments and flashes of the news, its presence part of the atmosphere like a close conversation that you’re not listening to but somehow manage to hear, the daily headlines transferred to my body by osmosis. And this, too, formed an education about the larger world, in how the repetition of these observations shaped my perceptions about the very peculiar life of adults. I could certainly recognize the President’s picture, perhaps a few foreign leaders, and I’m reasonably sure that I could recognize a few local representatives—the Mayor, the Governor, both Senators in New York—without knowing much more than how they appeared in photographs, beyond gleaning over time that nearly all of them were supposedly bad and that just a few of them, a much smaller group, were at least within the vicinity of good.
And this is right around the time that I became aware of a curious feature in the opinion section. This was a mere stumble, my eyes picking up the words Los Angeles Times and a writer’s name next to what I would now call a column; right below that was The Chicago Tribune and a different column. These were beguiling, grand cities, places that I had never been, of which I only had the faintest impressions. I recognized the names of those much larger papers, though I didn’t know why or even how those articles were printed in our local paper. Today I would refer to those items as syndicated columns, where individual journalists appear in papers across the country, something that probably reached its peak nearly two generations ago, though it is still in practice, without as much financial incentive, in our world. To my young eyes, however, there was something exotic about seeing those distant and famous voices in the local paper; I didn’t understand what I started to read, but it seemed expansive, outward, not at all provincial, these words from so far away that were somehow important enough to print in the local news. These columns were adjacent to the local reporters that I had started to learn about, the national opinion pieces adding context and offering a differing perspective, one that seemed related to rather than more important than our local news.
At one time, nearly every medium-sized city in the country had at least two papers, if not three or four or five, and there was a bit of competition for news, and a bit of competition for the journalists who covered that news. A local narrative would coalesce based on those rivalries, sometimes accurate, sometimes not, with the reporters who covered a small town meeting or a medium-sized city following their beat with the same alacrity of a journalist on Capitol Hill. But those few papers in every small city eventually became just one paper and plenty of rather large cities, in fact, don’t have any local reporters or even a local paper worthy of the name. Buffalo once had multiple papers, too, but now there is only one daily paper, and it mostly prints stories that you can read elsewhere. Today it is the distant voices that remain, with the local narrative simply absent, with all local conversations now indistinguishable from national conversations.
And when I think back on the education through observation that I received as a child, I conclude that I picked up a touch of various tendencies in my reading, in that I can be absorbed by reading like my father, the clock dissolving, the hours marked by the sun’s slide across the page, but I can also read in bursts during a long day like my mother, squeezing in a page or two while I make an afternoon coffee or in the rare times when I discover a few extra minutes. Books do make up the majority of my reading, thankfully, but I have also developed an obsession with the news along with the rest of the culture, and would be perfectly content to pass my days reading articles from around the world.
During an earlier decade, my education, what I observed and discerned and concluded from a home that received and engaged with a daily newspaper, would have more directly trained and shaped how I approached the coming years. Whether I had been born fifty or one hundred years earlier, the tools of discovery, the mechanisms used to investigate our world, would have been much the same for the learning child as the practicing adult. To engage with any society requires, of course, a potential to contain the cacophony, a standard, however flawed, of narrative that describes and defines your world. Much of childhood is consumed with the construction of the perceptual tools that are needed to comprehend society. Yet when I consider the tools best suited for our contemporary world, I see little that connects this world with life and its education from just a few years ago. Nor, I’m quite sure, will the current methods of education—the manner in which we learn how to comprehend our world—be remotely sufficient for those living just a few years from now.
I miss newspapers. Their physicality, smell, weekend comics, editorial cartoons, and their beginning to end experience. Newspapers today, the ones remaining, have shrunk in size and cannot compete with more timely digital coverage. I switched my newspaper subscriptions to digital because delivery of the physical versions was erratic at best. The digital experience is terrible for me. Especially since their formats now look like an endless blog. With endless links and distractions, videos, etc. I miss cutting out essays and saving the clipping in my journal or mailing to a friend. A former editorial cartoonist for two newspapers, I fondly remember the buzz of the newsroom, and editorial meetings. And the fun of seeing my cartoons in the paper. Yes, digital is easy and you can read your local paper anywhere on your device. But there’s no joy in it. Which is why I favor physical books. Their physicality. Easier on the eyes. I can slip notes in them and re-read years later. Call me a dinosaur, but increasingly, I’m tired of the entire blinking, glaring, soulless digital experience.
I have similar newspaper memories so I suspect your memory is more accurate than the credit you give yourself. I vividly remember running to the door with a few dimes or quarters when the paper delivery boy came by to collect. His tip was a rounded up few cents, which was a reward for bringing the paper all the way up to the door instead of leaving it in the front yard.
If you stretch your memory, I wonder if you might remember learning to read by reading the comics at that round kitchen table. It led to my ability to read sideways and upside down with the same ease as right-side-up as our table was small enough to lean across and read together.
Your description of the folding and cutting of an ambulatory paper is so precise and accurate. I wonder if my tendency to re-fold tissue paper according to the pattern and to fold table cloths and sheets with precision is connected to a real respect for a re-assembled newspaper for the next reader, even if it’s missing a few geometric shapes similar to gerrymandered voting blocks. “What happened here? (Gesturing to and looking at us through a hole) I wonder if we missed a payment.”
I marvel at the variety of terms we used too. There was the “sports page”, which was its own independent, multiple page section, but the “obits section” (reading that was a practice I didn’t know was unusual and perceived as morbid by others until many years later) were one or several pages of a section. Comics were “the funnies” and the editorials were sometimes skipped entirely and other times clipped and shared.
However, all of this misses the mark. You were describing a different world for information consumers. I think my children would laugh and wonder what possessed me if I told them I wanted to read a daily paper which was printed on paper.