I am approaching my 70th birthday, so I’ve see major changes in countless technologies and institutions. I made calls on a rotary phone. Last January, I watched Indiana win the national championship in college football. I’ve seen plenty of things change.
In light of a recent column by James Spain and a recent article by David Brooks, this seems to be a fine time for me to reflect on changes I have witnessed in the venerable institution that you might be holding in your hands right now: the daily newspaper.
I became a newspaper fan early on. Starting in the second grade, it was my morning ritual to bring in the Citizen-Journal, spread it out on the floor in the front hall, and read it. In my youth, Columbus had two daily papers, the C-J in the morning and in the afternoon, the Columbus Dispatch, which proudly calls itself “Ohio’s Greatest Home Newspaper.”
I read the Dispatch, and in the seventh grade, I delivered it, too. I loved being a paperboy, tossing papers onto porches and listening to the satisfying thud when they landed well. The only down side was that we did our collections — 67 cents a week at first, later increased to 80 cents — on Friday nights. I was always a little bit wistful when I walked my route with a changemaker strapped to my belt listening to the band music and the cheers a couple of blocks over at the high school football stadium.
After I went to college in the mid 1970s, there was a big shift in the Columbus newspaper scene. Both the C-J and the Dispatch were printed on presses owned by the Dispatch, and when the Dispatch moved from afternoons to mornings, the C-J was forced out and Columbus became a one-newspaper town.
My freshman year at college, I subscribed to the Washington Post and had it delivered to my dorm room. My senior year, I was the entertainment editor of the student newspaper, the Ring-tum Phi, reprising my high school role as the arts editor of The Torch. Newspapers are kind of in my blood.
When I moved to Annapolis, Maryland, in 1983, one of the first things I did was subscribe to the Annapolis Capital. When I moved to Concord in 1987, I did the same thing, subscribing to the Monitor for weekdays and the Boston Globe for Sundays. In both Annapolis and Concord, I saw the same thing happen that happened in Columbus; both the Capital and the Monitor switched from afternoon delivery to morning delivery.
After adding a Sunday edition, the Monitor chugged right along, landing on capital-area doorsteps seven days a week. But there have been changes, too. I remember the fanfare of the move from downtown Concord to a new printing plant. One of the glories of the new plant was using ink that didn’t rub off on the hands of readers, a bane of my paperboy career. Alas, that new plant is now the old plant, abandoned after a move to one that is far outside town.
And the Monitor has shrunk in a couple of ways. The Sunday edition has been discontinued, and the editions that remain are more slender than the ones of years past. As the parent of a young athlete, I loved seeing our daughter’s name in squibs in the sports section roundup, but no longer is there space for rec-league results, middle school results, or even JV results.
I’d imagine that it sounds like I’m working myself into a cranky-old-man rant in which everything from yesterday is better than anything from today, but I’m not. Don’t get me wrong, now that the Monitor has phased out carrier-based home delivery, it makes me sad that my columns don’t show up on my doorstep every three weeks like they used to. But when I pull my Monitor out of my post office box, I like what I see. In my view, the Monitor has responded well to its new realities.
In the face of early deadlines imposed by a distant printing press, the Monitor has moved toward long-form investigative journalism that isn’t all that time sensitive. And while this may sound a bit self-serving, I am deeply impressed by the corps of thoughtful columnists the Monitor has assembled.
Finally, from the “the more things change, the more they remain the same” department, there is this. Years ago, my very first column shared the Forum section with an editorial cartoon by a syndicated cartoonist who was a colleague of mine on my college newspaper. Several high school friends who went into journalism have left the profession — or the profession has left them — but my cartoonist friend, like me, is still going strong. Good for us. And good for the daily newspaper.