I’m trying to remember the last time I read a newspaper.
That might sound strange. I subscribe to both the New York Times and the Washington Post, and I spend a couple hours a day reading them.
So what’s the problem?
The last time I actually held a Times in my hands was five years ago, although I was in Washington and held a paper Post was January.
Mostly I read both papers in my iMac or on my iPhone.
It’s better than nothing, but it isn’t the same. When I lived in Los Angeles, the L.A. Times had a daily circulation that surpassed 1 million copies. As of the first quarter of 2022, its daily circulation was 142,000. At its peak, USA Today sold more than 2 million copies a day. Its most recent total was 159,000.
To some extent, that’s a factor of people reading their local paper on the Internet instead of picking it up on their front porch, but an awful lot of people just aren’t reading newspapers anymore. Even when they’re checking in one news websites, they’re reading shorter stories and the stories they do read are quite often soaked with opinion.
The whole idea of paper newspapers isn’t an unmixed blessing. Maybe it matters to use fewer trees for paper. I have been a voracious reader since before I started school in the early 1950s, and even now I own hundreds and hundreds of books. But I own several thousand books that are in digital form and probably 90 percent of my reading is on a Kindle, a Nook, an iPad or an iPhone.
In fact, I’ve grown so accustomed to reading digitally that once recently when I was reading an actual book, I reached the end of a page and instead of turning the page, my initial reaction was to swipe my index finger from right to left across the page to call up the next page.
I'[m proud that my wife and I bought Kindle readers for each of our six grandchildren and ever more proud that they use them.
So I am adjusting to the modern world, although I do wish we lived one county closer to Atlanta so that I could have the Journal-Constitution delivered on a daily basis.
Oh well.