On Friday, word came out that the New York Times is threatening to shut down the print incarnation of the Boston Globe unless the paper’s unions agree to $20 million in cost reductions. As a former Bostonian, I still think of the Globe as one of my hometown papers–and my current hometown paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, is currently under a similar deathwatch imposed by its owner, Hearst.
I’m shocked and distressed by both developments. But I’m also part of the problem. I stopped subscribing to the Globe years before I left Boston, and have never taken the Chronicle. The last print paper I subscribed to was the New York Times, and I canceled that a couple of years ago–in part because it kept getting stolen off my stoop, but also because it often sat unread in my living room.
But it’s not just that I don’t need any newspaper enough to pay to get it delivered to my home. I’m having trouble remembering the last time I read any copy of any newspaper. It was probably a USA Today that was sitting outside my hotel room during a trip–when I pick up that paper and stick it on the dresser, I usually glance at the headlines, at least. But not always. And I can’t tell you when I last spent enough time with USA Today to open the paper up and read the stories it contained. (By the time I encounter it, I’ve usually read a lot of news. On the Web. Which I can do without so much as opening the door.)
I’m feeling guilty just writing this–I grew up in a family that subscribed to three or four papers; my first job was delivering the Boston Herald (badly); I used to spend hours in the Boston Public Library’s newspaper room reading articles and comics from around the world; and I might not have gotten into the profession I did if it weren’t for all that exposure to inspiring journalism printed on dead trees. But I get my news from the Web now, with a dose of radio and a smidgen of TV. I don’t think I could retrain myself to read papers if I tried.
Here’s a little silly T-Poll:
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