Writing to
our soldier son the other day, I found myself quoting from an op-ed column in The Washington Post, and that got me to
thinking about the newspaper habit and how it changes over the years.
For
example, I used to be a big San Francisco
Chronicle reader. At the local paper where I worked, the newsroom had a
subscription, and I could always look at it during the lunch hour, though it
was not unusual to have to wait for someone else to finish with it. The
Chronicle in those days was the object of a lot of scorn, but it was a much
better paper than most people gave it credit for being. The writing and
headlines were consistently sharp, and the columnists — Herb Caen, Charles
McCabe, Art Hoppe — were unbeatable.
In 1992 I
started a public relations business after leaving the paper, and part of my job
was to get clients into the San Jose
Mercury, if possible, so I gradually phased out the Chronicle and became a
daily Mercury reader. A couple of years ago, I stopped. Their coverage of our
area now consists of reprinted stories from the Santa Cruz Sentinel, which I already get, so the Mercury became
redundant.
An Offer I Couldn’t Refuse
Not long
after starting the PR business, I got an intriguing offer in the mail to
subscribe to The Washington Post National
Weekly Edition for some ridiculously low amount of money. It was
deductible, so how could I say no, and I became a devoted reader.
The Weekly,
as it was called, was a tabloid, about 36-44 pages a week, with next to no
advertising. It carried a mix of stories, ranging from in-depth features, news
analyses, book reviews, op-ed columns and the like. I’d take it with me when I
went out to lunch or for a cup of coffee, and sometimes I’d read it in the
office when I was sitting on my hands until a client called back. That was when
people still did business by telephone.
Sometimes
I’d go out to lunch and realize I’d left the paper in the office. A search of
my car would usually turn up an older edition that I hadn’t finished, and I
could read that — in fact, found I often got as much out of the older issue as
I would have from the current one.
The Value of Waiting for News
That taught
me a valuable lesson. I came to realize that for most news, specifically the
news that didn’t immediately and directly impact me, I was better off waiting
to read about it. By the time The Weekly arrived, an event it reported might be
almost two weeks old, but the analysis piece it carried put the matter in
focus, and the by then I had a better sense of perspective about how important
it truly was. The reality is that for most news, it’s not that critical to know
about it right away, and it’s better to wait until you can get a more complete
picture and be truly informed.
At the end
of 2009 The Weekly published its last edition, a victim of the Internet and the
toll it’s taken on newspapers. Six months later, I bought an iPad, and a short
time afterward received a subscription to try The New York Times for iPad for a month for a dollar. I did, and I
was hooked. That’s now taken the place of The Weekly as my
national/international newspaper. Let’s see how long a run this one has.
