A love letter to newspapers

If you had told me in December 1995, when I graduated from journalism school, that newspapers would be practically obsolete in 25 years and I’d be out of a job, I would have said you were bat-shit crazy.

Newspaper journalism was thriving, and there was nothing to indicate that things were going anywhere but up. The news cycle had been especially hot those few years—the Oklahoma City bombing, the O.J. Simpson trial, the war in Bosnia, the Unabomber, Dolly the sheep, the Atlanta Olympics bombing, Bill Clinton’s reelection, JonBenet Ramsey’s murder—and it hardly stopped there. A ton more lurked on the horizon: Pol Pot, serial killer Andrew Cunanan, the release of “Titanic,” the death of Princess Diana and the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal.

The World Wide Web didn’t have much to offer back then. Most normal folks didn’t really use the internet; I used Netscape once in a journalism lab on a boxy little Mac Classic. It wasn’t fun or entertaining; pages took forever to load, everything was black and white, and there were really just a bunch of scientific journals online. (Not to mention that nobody used the word “online.”) Reading a newspaper on the internet would have been frustrating and unenjoyable.

Recently, my brother was helping me with this website. He said, “The only thing I don’t like is that it focuses so much on newspapers.” I could tell he was trying not to hurt my feelings as he tried to persuade me to use a background other than the running newspaper (the very one floating behind this blog post). He had an excellent point: If I’m trying to move my career into the future, then equating my name with newspapers will only make me seem like a relic—and not the cherished-Sistine-Chapel kind of relic, but the cursed-bejeweled-skull kind from an “Indiana Jones” movie where the natives get very angry.

The trouble is, I love newspapers. It’s a true love that runs deeply, like when you break up with someone but you still love them no matter what, even when you run into them the next weekend and they’ve already hooked up with somebody else (in this case, their name is The Internet) and it breaks your heart that you’re not with them anymore, but you still want the best for them. That kind of love.

For starters, I love the way a newspaper smells fresh off the presses. I’ve never worked in a press room so I don’t know exactly what chemicals they use, but if you mixed Windex and ink, that’s what it smells like. And it’s strong. When you take a whiff of your newspaper at home, this smell has mostly worn off. So right there, it’s a special thing that only people who work there get to experience.

People (including me) still get excited if their name or picture is in the paper. I am betting that nearly every one of you reading this has an old newspaper clipping of themselves stashed away somewhere in a scrapbook, file or picture frame. It could be when your high school football team made the playoffs. Or when you got engaged or married. Or when you won the spelling bee by spelling “insouciant” correctly. In my case, it was when my kindergarten class visited a local bank in 1978. That's me in the middle, apparently sucking my thumb:

Oh, sure, people get excited when they’re online, too. That same brother of mine was interviewed by a TV station in South Florida last year, when everyone was preparing for a hurricane. (Remember when there was other news besides coronavirus?) It was exciting to see him! Trouble was, I couldn’t print out the TV interview. I couldn’t put it in a scrapbook, file or picture frame. There’s no permanency to it.

When your favorite football team won that big championship, did you see them down there on the field, waving around a computer screen that said CHAMPS on it? Nope. But they were waving newspapers around. Because newspapers make it real.

I am the only person I know of who has both started and stopped the presses. This may seem like a simple thing, but it’s not, and also I probably shouldn’t even be telling people because the former is a huge labor union violation. (But we’ll keep that secret, because really, who is reading this blog, anyway?) Starting the presses was really quite neat, and I use that word on purpose because the giant machine I was revving up was certainly a relic from the 1950s or earlier. (Eat your heart out, Indiana.)

Of course, now you’re wondering: How did I get to start the presses when I didn’t work in the press room or belong to the union? The answer is: by flirting with the press guys. (Duh. This isn’t rocket science.)

Before that moment, I had thought that starting a press was some sort of combination of levers and switches and flashing lights, like something on the space shuttle. It was more like Apollo 11: I was in a tiny room with just a bunch of flashing buttons. There was one big red one that I just had to push, Push, PUSH, PUSHPUSHPUSHPUSH! And voila! The rollers rolled and the ink spattered and the papers churned out. It was actually very cool, but I’m guessing that coolness wore off for the press guys after day two.

Stopping the presses was a whole other frenzied story. I was working at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 1999. The Braves were playing in the World Series against the Yankees, and we accidentally printed the wrong score in really big type. At the time, I was managing the output of pages deep in the basement composing room (another relic!), and it was very late, around 3 a.m., when we realized that we had shipped out truckloads of papers with the wrong score on them. I was the person who got to shout, “STOP THE PRESSES!” And let me tell you, it’s nowhere as fun as it seems in the movies. In real life, you are freaking out inside because you’re sure you’re going to get fired the next day. In real life, you are fielding phone calls from a very-pissed managing editor that you just woke up from a deep sleep, your very-pissed boss upstairs in the newsroom and a very-pissed union supervisor who is reminding you that recalling the trucks will cost the company $30,000. In real life, you drink a lot of scotch when you get home that night at 4:30 a.m.

So here we are in 2020, and my love affair with newspapers has seemingly come to an end. I realize that I will have to let go. I sometimes think about those people back in the early 1900s who used to make water troughs for horses. The roads were lined with troughs, and they were an absolute necessity to travel from point A to point B. And then the sleek new automobile swooped in, and within a few decades, people who made troughs were out of a job. This has happened time and again in America; after all, progress is a wonderful thing. But it definitely sucks when you’re a victim of it.

For now, at least, the newspaper stays on the website. And I might add a trough, too, because lord knows I will need a drink of water on this grueling trip of finding a new career. Add scotch and ice, and we’re all set.