SPECIAL REPORT
By MICHAEL WEISSENSTEIN
The sun would rise over the Rockies, and Robin Gammons would run to the front porch to grab the morning paper before school.
She wanted the comics and her dad wanted sports, but the Montana Standard meant more than their daily race to grab “Calvin and Hobbes” or baseball scores. When one of the three kids made honor roll, won a basketball game or dressed a freshly slain bison for the History Club, appearing in the Standard’s pages made the achievement feel more real. Robin became an artist with a one-woman show at a downtown gallery and the front-page article went on the fridge, too. Five years later, the yellowing article is still there.
The Montana Standard slashed print circulation to three days a week two years ago, cutting back the expense of printing like 1,200 U.S. newspapers over the past two decades. About 3,500 papers closed over the same time. An average of two a week have shut this year.
That slow fade, it turns out, means more than changing news habits. It speaks directly to the newspaper’s presence in our lives — not just in terms of the information printed upon it, but in its identity as a physical object with many other uses.
“You can pass it on. You can keep it. And then, of course, there’s all the fun things,” says Diane DeBlois, one of the founders of the Ephemera Society of America, a group of scholars, researchers, dealers and collectors who focus on what they call “precious primary source information.”
“Newspapers wrapped fish. They washed windows. They appeared in outhouses,” she says. “And — free toilet paper.”
The downward lurch in the media business has changed American democracy over the last two decades — some think for better, many for worse. What’s indisputable: The gradual dwindling of the printed paper — the item that so many millions read to inform themselves and then repurposed into household workflows — has quietly altered the texture of daily life.
American democracy and pet cages
People used to catch up on the world, then save their precious memories, protect their floors and furniture, wrap gifts, line pet cages and light fires. In Butte, in San Antonio, Texas, in much of New Jersey and worldwide, lives without the printed paper are just a tiny bit different.
For newspaper publishers, the expense of printing is just too high in an industry that’s under strain in an online society. For ordinary people, the physical paper is joining the pay phone, the cassette tape, the answering machine, the bank check, the sound of the internal combustion engine and the ivory-white pair of women’s gloves as objects whose disappearance marks the passage of time.
“Very hard to see it while it’s happening, much easier to see things like that in even modest retrospect,” says Marilyn Nissenson, co-author of “Going Going Gone: Vanishing Americana.” “Young women were going to work and they wore them for a while and then one day they looked at them and thought, ‘This is ludicrous.’ That was a small but telling icon for a much larger social change.”
Nick Mathews thinks a lot about newspapers. Both of his parents worked at the Pekin (Illinois) Daily Times. He went on to become sports editor of the Houston Chronicle and, now, an assistant professor at the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism.
“I have fond memories of my parents using newspapers to wrap presents,” he says. “In my family, you always knew that the gift was from my parents because of what it was wrapped in.”
In Houston, he recently recalled, the Chronicle reliably sold out when the Astros, Rockets or Texas won a championship because so many people wanted the paper as a keepsake.
Four years ago, Mathews interviewed 19 people in Caroline County, Virginia, about the 2018 shuttering of the Caroline Progress, a 99-year-old weekly paper that was shuttered months before its 100th anniversary.
In “Print Imprint: The Connection Between the Physical Newspaper and the Self,” published in the Journal of Communication Inquiry, wistful Virginians remember their senior high school portrait and their daughter’s picture in a wedding dress appearing in the Progress. Plus, one told Mathews, “My fingers are too clean now. I feel sad without ink smudges.”
The many and varied uses
Flush with cash from Omahans who invested years ago with local boy Warren Buffett, Nebraska Wildlife Rehab is a well-equipped center for migratory waterfowl, wading birds, reptiles, foxes, bobcats, coyotes, mink and beaver.
“We get over 8,000 animals every year and we use that newspaper for almost all of those animals,” Executive Director Laura Stastny says.
Getting old newspapers has never been a problem in this neighborly Midwestern city. Yet Stastny frets about the electronic future.
“We do pretty well now,” she says. “If we lost that source and had to use something else or had to purchase something, that, with the available options that we have now, would cost us more than $10,000 a year easily.”
That would be nearly 1% of the budget, Stastny says, but “I’ve never been in a position to be without them, so I might be shocked with a higher dollar figure.”
Until 1974, the Omaha World-Herald printed a morning edition and two afternoon ones, including a late-afternoon Wall Street Edition with closing prices.
“Afternoon major-league baseball was still standard then, so I got to gorge on both baseball and stock market facts,” an 85-year-old Buffett told the World-Herald in 2013, By then, he had become the world’s most famous investor and the paper’s owner.
The World-Herald ended its second afternoon edition in 2016 and Buffett left the newspaper business five years ago. Fewer than 60,000 households take the paper today, according to Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, down from nearly more than 190,000 in 2005, or about one per household.
Time marches on
Few places symbolize the move from print to digital more than Akalla, a district of Stockholm where the ST01 data center sits at a site once occupied by the factory that prints Sweden main newspaper, Kaun says.
“They have less and less machines, and instead the building is taken over more and more by this co-location data center,” she says.
Data centers use huge amounts of energy, of course, and the environmental benefit of using less printing paper is also offset by the enormous popularity of online shopping.
“You will see a decline in printed papers, but there is a huge increase in packaging,” says Cecilia Alcoreza, manager, of forest sector transformation for the World Wildlife Fund.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution announced in August that it would stop providing a print edition at year’s end and go completely digital, making Atlanta the largest U.S. metro area without a printed daily newspaper.
The habit of following the news — of being informed about the world — can’t be divorced from the existence of print, says Anne Kaun, professor of media and communication studies at Södertörn University in Stockholm.
Children who grew up in homes with printed newspapers and magazines randomly came across news and socialized into a news-reading habit, Kaun observed. With cell phones, that doesn’t happen.
“I do think it meaningfully changes how we relate to each other, how we relate to things like the news. It is reshaping attention spans and communications,” says Sarah Wasserman, a cultural critic and assistant dean at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire who specializes in changing forms of communication.
“These things will always continue to exist in certain spheres and certain pockets and certain class niches,” she says. “But I do think they’re fading.”
1 Comment
Searching historical fact may be more difficult in the future. I have used newspapers to locate factual delivery and circumstances in my books, but there has been a change into their timeliness and what they report. I wrote the following in the Standard Times years ago… even before such use of social media…
The photograph appeared in a 1966 edition of the Del Rio News-Herald, along with the caption, “Cave Yields Plunder from Burglaries.” Texas Ranger L.H. Purvis and Val Verde County Deputy Samuel Perez were shown with stolen property they dug up in a cave near Pumpville. This was just one of more than eighty instances where newspapers provided bits of history for the author’s book The Gun That Wasn’t There. It is also just one example of why newspapers are important in our society.
Writing non-fiction books has really opened my eyes to the value of those who reported on crimes and specific or local events during previous periods of time. Several photographs and other bits of information (18 in all) in No Reason to Kill, the investigation into the death of Sheila Gay Elrod, came from the archives of the San Angelo Standard-Times or from one of their reporters.
In each of those books, searching the newspapers allowed me to see other events that occurred during the same time period and provided facts that corroborated things witnesses told me. Greg Magers was just a teenager back in 1964, but he remembered that a “Blue Norther” had blown in the night he and a friend went to Garner Park in an attempt to capture the “Caveman Bandit,” who was the focus of a manhunt in The Gun That Wasn’t There. “The San Antonio Express-News newspaper ran front-page stories about the weather on Monday and Tuesday. The boys didn’t know it at the time, but the newspaper’s Wednesday edition would include headlines that read, “140 Dead in Eastern Snowstorm, and lower down, “Fort Worth with 4 degrees at dawn had the coldest Jan. 14 on record…”
It was an obituary printed in a Macon County, Illinois newspaper that educated me about the life of my great – great grandfather, including a fact I left out of Steps into God’s Country, my fourth book, listing that he was very active in the Illinois Democratic Party. Part of my family’s history was documented in the newspaper and I found it by researching my ancestor.
My latest non-fiction production, Women, Whiskey and Sin (Part One) allowed me to see the real value of the printed word. San Angelo was just a village known as Santa Angela (or Saint Angela) back then (1875) and the earliest version of the Tom Green Times that I found was years later. Neither was the San Angelo Standard which came about on Saturday, May 3, 1884 (The forerunner of the San Angelo Standard-Times). So while I had researched records for two years to produce a piece of history, what are missing are the facts written by the reporter’s hand.
J.G. Murphy and W.A. Guthrie started their newspaper with a by-line that read, “The Standard, $2 Per Year in Advance.” They listed their titles as editors and proprietors and by 1884, 9 years after Tom Green County was organized, they showed their address as San Angelo, Texas.
In a column they titled – Salutatory – they wrote, “In making our debut in the list of journalism, it is necessary to follow the time-honored custom of defining our platform, the course we intend to pursue and the motive which prompted us to undertake the arduous and important task.” (Arduous means difficult, according to Webster’s Dictionary.)
“We have no excuses to make, and our only reason for issuing the Standard is because we believe there exists a good opportunity for a live newspaper in this, the largest county, except one, in the United States. In fact a majority of the people in the county seem to think that there is an absolute necessity for a newspaper that will keep pace with our growing section. We propose to do our utmost to make the Standard fill the vacancy.”
Murphy and Guthrie let the readers know they were experienced. “Being practiced printers and having had some experience in journalism we do not go into this venture with any exaggerated ideas of its results. We are aware of the cares, anxieties and disappointments in store for all who engage in the newspaper profession, and we certainly do not expect to be exempted. Having faith in the future of this section, however, our aim and object is to advertise the great natural advantages of Tom Green County for stock-raising, farming and manufacturing – advantages that have only to be known to be recognized, – feeling sure that when the county of Tom Green and the city of San Angelo attain the growth and take the rank we anticipate, the Standard shall not be without its reward.”
Now, more than 130 years later, the San Angelo Standard-Times still exists, having several new owners and a difference in physical existence over time, but with rewards that probably stood on the words written in that first issue: “Our earnest endeavor will be to conduct the Standard on the principle of justice and truth, and we will ever uphold right and denounce wrong. In politics we shall maintain a strict neutrality, and be independent of political factions or influence. We do not expect to dabble deeply in politics, as our time and space can be devoted to a better use. The encouragement we have received leads us to believe that we will be enabled to issue a journal that will reflect credit on ourselves and be worthy of the patronage and support of this community.” They ended that column with, “Very respectfully, Murphy and Guthrie.”
The first issue was full of advertisements for things like White & Robenson Druggests, Lech and Landrum Land Insurance Agents, Smith’s Pioneer Drug Store, The Concho National Bank, James Moorkens and Co. General Merchandise and many others, but it was also full of little tidbits about what was happening within the growing town and the county. There was talk about the value of land, the approaching railroad, intelligent and industrious settlers, taxes and a city population that stood at 2500. There was a piece about how a cowboy stopped a stampede and other details about things that happened locally.
More than a dozen years ago, when I wrote the 40 Year History of the Concho Bass Club, I searched through hundreds and hundreds of pages of San Angelo Standard-Times newspaper copy, mostly with tiring eyes made so by the small screen of a microfiche machine. I was amazed at how many local stories about all kinds of events were within each of those issues, and how pictures of fish catches appeared regularly throughout, as did deer taken during hunting season. I can’t remember who told me then, but someone said, “Mr. Harte (previous owner) would walk into the newsroom and encourage us to include those personal mementos.”
There have been many changes in the newspaper industry since the first copy was printed by Murphy and Guthrie. In recent times, journalistic ethics have changed and the costs of doing business, especially the price of paper, ink and fuel, have risen considerably. Yet their words and photographs, years later, may be the only account of something important to any one of us. Whether a wedding announcement, obituary, social or sporting event, crime account or something special in history’s itinerary, newspapers everywhere have long been what my friend Cliff Wagnor says are, “Our official records of the past.”
History is documented within our newspapers. Their pages provide the – who, where and how of what happened when. Those words and pictures are as the artist’s brush to the canvas that produces a likeness of a landscape from long ago…
(It is sad but within the last few decades large corporations have purchased many community and regional newspapers – and placed editors there that see the landscape differently or have an intent to turn the green grass brown. Some even want to destroy the very history that is the very prize held by the ink on paper.)