SUSAN SWARTZ 9-1-2011

When I flew from Boston to San Francisco I was the only one
reading a newspaper in my row. At least I could wrestle it into
foldable parts without competing for elbow room, but I was
disappointed because I had made a point to notice people buying
papers in the terminal. And it was an early morning flight, the
traditional newspaper reading and coffee drinking hour.
I’m always on the look-out for other newspaper readers. Those
who still get their news from print. Hard core types. Purists, we
might call ourselves, those who consume news the way God and
Gutenberg intended.
I also have a habit of asking people how they get their news.
It’s a conversation starter, if nothing else. At a dinner party a
New York businessman said he reads the Wall Street Journal in
print, Bloomberg News on his iPad and a couple of other online
sources for entertainment and New York gossip. He prefers the
printed newspaper for subway and bathroom reading. He’s 40-ish,
grew up in a newspaper reading household and wants to keep them
around his home so his kids will grow up knowing what the real
thing looks like.
A lot of people are prematurely nostalgic for newspapers. “I
used to read newspapers all the time,” some members of my
generation will say, with the sentimental reverence you might
attach to an old Chevy or a Mounds bar.
So I’m always thrilled to discover someone from a younger
generation, who I might expect to be of the online persuasion,
preferring print. Author Anne Zimmerman, who wrote the delicious
new biography of M.F.K. Fisher’s early years, An Extravagant
Hunger, compared reading on the web to print.
“When I’m reading on the web I skim,” she said. “My attention
jumps around and it’s more of a fact-finding mission than a real
enjoyable learning experience.”
Now there is proof that print might actually be better for us,
cognition-wise. A study by the University of Oregon reported that
people who read the news in print remember the topics and details
better than when they gulp it online.
My whole writing career has been in print so I have a personal
and professional loyalty to words in black and white that you can
hold in your hands. I still free lance for newspapers and the other
day a woman at the grocery store told me she likes finding me in
her paper. Then she said that she doesn’t normally read a paper but
her husband does and when he’s through he passes them on to her to
keep things clean in her art studio. So, that’s where she finds me,
under a blob of burnt sienna.
My best argument for reading an actual newspaper is the
unintended information you get from a random sighting. You’re
reading about the latest political bloodbath or checking to see if
the Giants are out of their slump and your eyes slide over to a
story you never knew you needed or wanted to know about. And there
it is – a little gift.
I had a pile of papers waiting for me after vacation, including
two dailies, the Sunday edition of a third paper and two weeklies
which could not go into the recycle bin until I went through them.
Otherwise I would have missed a new report on migraines, a review
of a new BBC series and a story quoting poet Mary Oliver on the
need for solitude. I surely would have missed the story about one
of my favorite librarians opening a Brazilian wax business.
Susan Swartz is a local author and journalist. You can also read
her at www.juicytomatoes.com and hear her Another Voice commentary
on KRCB-FM radio on Fridays. Email is [email protected].