As an old-school lover of newspapers, I’m particularly thrilled to have a double-page spread with a bonus Brownie-era photo published in Sunday’s New York Daily News.
That a black and white snapshot my 30-something father took with his Brownie Starflex in 1958 is now splashed across two pages of New York’s hometown paper in a whole other century, delights this former hometown girl to no end.
My article landed in the right place
To a lifelong lover of paper, it is particularly meaningful to have a hard copy of a story I wrote.
Say what you will, print still matters.
To me.
Sure, the feel, and smell of newsprint are primal, but it’s the permanence of it, that matters to me.
An avid collector of ephemera, along with hundreds of boxes filled with a century’s worth of vintage magazines I also collect newspapers past and present. The mundane and the momentous, the tragedies and the celebrations of the twentieth century as portrayed in print seem vital to me, even as newspapers themselves are on life support.
Newspapers, once our main source of receiving breaking news still remain for me tangible evidence of the facts. Seeing history in black and white makes it real for me in a very visceral way.
There is permanency in print.
Unlike sound bites that disappear into the ether, print allows me to linger, and return again and again.
And I confess, reading articles online pales to reading them in print.
Ok boomer, I can hear millennials say in a generational rolling of their eyes.
Don’t get me wrong I get most of my news from the web, on my computer, my tablet, and more often than not my iPhone.
I love the immediacy of the web, the far and diverse range of audiences it reaches, and how it generates immediate feedback creating interchanges on Twitter and social media.
But newsprint focuses. There is no scrolling and clicking. It blocks distraction. Reading online I comprehend less, often forgetting why I clicked on a page and start randomly clicking on outside links until I’m tumbling through cyberspace like a marooned astronaut.
Paper is grounding.
But for those who don’t live in New York, please enjoy my story ….