As the sun rose over the Rocky Mountains, Robin Gammons ran to the front door to get the morning paper before going to school.
She loved comics and her father wanted sports, but the Montana Standard meant more to her than “Calvin and Hobbes” or the daily competition for baseball scores. When one of my three children made the honor roll, when I won a basketball game, when I dressed a freshly killed bison for the history club, the accomplishment felt more real when it appeared in the pages of the Standard.
Robin had a solo exhibition at a downtown gallery and a front-page article on her refrigerator. Five years later, the yellowed articles still remain.
Two years ago, the Montana Standard cut its print run to three days a week, cutting printing costs as 1,200 other U.S. newspapers have done over the past 20 years. Approximately 3,500 papers were closed during the same period. This year, an average of two stores closed per week.
This slow decline turns out to be about more than changing news habits. This directly speaks to the existence of newspapers in our lives. Not only in terms of the information printed in the newspaper, but also in its identity as a physical object used for a variety of other purposes.
“You can pass it on, you can keep it, and of course it’s a lot of fun,” said Diane DeBlois, one of the founders of the American Ephemera Society, a group of scholars, researchers, dealers and collectors. They focus on what they call “valuable primary information.”
“Newspaper wrapped fish, washed windows, and appeared in outhouses,” she says. “And–free toilet paper.”
The downturn in the media business has transformed American democracy over the past two decades. Some people think in a good way and some people think in a bad way. What’s incontrovertible: The gradual decline of printed paper—an item that so many people read to learn about themselves and then reuse in their domestic workflows—quietly changed the atmosphere of daily life.
American democracy and pet cages
People used to know the world, preserve precious memories, protect floors and furniture, wrap gifts, line pet cages, and light fires. In Butte, San Antonio, much of New Jersey, and around the world, life without printed paper is just a little different.
For newspaper companies, printing costs are too high in an industry strained by the online world. For ordinary people, physical paper joins payphones, cassette tapes, answering machines, bank checks, and ivory-and-white ladies’ gloves as objects whose disappearance marks the passage of time.
“It’s very hard to actually see what’s going on, but it’s much easier to understand such things even in modest retrospect,” says Marilyn Nissenson, co-author of Going Going Gone: Vanishing Americana. She said of these women’s gloves: “Young women wore gloves to work for a while, and then one day they looked at them and thought, ‘This is ridiculous.'” It was small, but it symbolized a larger social change. ”
Nick Matthews thinks a lot about newspapers. Both his parents worked at the Daily Times in Beijing (Illinois). He is a former sports editor at the Houston Chronicle and is currently an assistant professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism.
“I have fond memories of my parents wrapping presents in newspaper,” he says. “In my family, we always knew a gift came from our parents when we saw it wrapped.”
I was recently reminded that in Houston, when the Astros, Rockets, and University of Texas won championships, the Chronicle would definitely sell out because so many people wanted it as a souvenir.
Four years ago, Matthews interviewed 19 people in Caroline County, Virginia, about the 2018 closure of the weekly magazine The Caroline Progress, which went out of print a few months before its 100th anniversary.
In “Print Findings: The Relationship between Physical Newspapers and the Self,” published in the Journal of Communication Inquiry, a pensive Virginian recalls a high school portrait and a photograph of her daughter in a wedding dress from The Progress. Additionally, one person told Matthews: “My fingers are getting too clean. I miss them without the ink stains.”
Wide variety of uses
Fueled by cash from Omahans who invested with local boy Warren Buffett several years ago, the Nebraska Wildlife Rehabilitation Facility is a well-equipped center for migratory birds, wading birds, reptiles, foxes, bobcats, coyotes, mink and beavers.
“We adopt out more than 8,000 animals each year, and we use the newspaper for nearly all of those animals,” says Executive Director Laura Stastny.
Obtaining old newspapers has never been a problem in this nearby Midwestern city. Still, Stastny worries about the future of electronics.
“It’s going pretty well now,” she says. “If you were to lose that source and have to use something else or buy something else, it would cost you easily over $10,000 a year with the options available today.”
This equates to nearly 1% of your budget, but “I’ve never been in a position where I couldn’t do without it, so a higher amount might be shocking,” Stastny says.
Until 1974, the Omaha World-Herald printed one morning edition and two afternoon editions, including a late afternoon Wall Street edition with closing prices.
“At that time, afternoon Major League Baseball was still the norm, so I was able to get a lot of facts about both baseball and the stock market,” Buffett, 85, told the World-Herald in 2013. By then he was the world’s most famous investor and owner of the newspaper.
The World-Herald discontinued its second afternoon edition in 2016, and Buffett retired from the newspaper industry five years ago. According to Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, fewer than 60,000 households now subscribe to the newspaper, down from nearly 190,000 households in 2005, or about one per household.
time moves on
Anne Kaun, a professor of media and communication studies at Soderthorn University in Stockholm, says few places epitomize the transition from print to digital more than Stockholm’s Akala district, where the ST01 data center is located on the site of a former factory that printed Sweden’s major newspapers.
“You’re going to have fewer and fewer machines, and instead buildings are going to be taken over more and more by these colocation data centers,” she says.
Of course, data centers use a lot of energy, and the environmental benefits of using less printing paper are offset by the huge popularity of online shopping.
“Printed paper will go down, but wrapping paper will go up significantly,” said Cecilia Alcoreza, forestry sector transformation manager at the World Wildlife Fund.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution announced in August that it would cease offering print editions at the end of the year and go completely digital, making Atlanta the largest metropolitan area in the United States without a printed daily newspaper.
The habit of following the news, or being informed about the world, is inseparable from the existence of print, says Coun.
Children who grew up in homes with printed newspapers and magazines were exposed to the news randomly and were socialized into the habit of reading it, she said. That doesn’t happen with mobile phones.
“I think it’s meaningfully changing the way we interact with each other and the way we interact with things like the news. It’s reshaping attention spans and communication,” says Sarah Wasserman, a cultural critic and associate dean at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire who specializes in changing forms of communication.
“These things are always going to exist in certain areas, in certain pockets, in certain class niches,” she says. “But I think they are disappearing.”
Weissenstein writes for The Associated Press.
