Fellow ink-stained wretch here. Newspapers were my lifeblood for almost four decades. My debut novel is a love letter to the newsrooms of yore. Thanks for bringing back memories, Kelley.
This is a great and much needed post, Kelley! It's really sad just how bad newspapers have become today. Like the newspapers you read growing up, ours here in Nebraska are also a shadow of what they used to be; and, get this, they print the same stories in multiple online papers because they're all owned by the same conglomerate! Also, when I was a kid, my favorite section wasn't the comics; it was the entertainment section. I loved to look at all the full page ads for movies that were playing in town or coming soon. Recently, I've been doing research online through a website that lets you look at digital copies of old newspapers. They were so much better written back then, even better than the online "news" websites we have today. Oh well, so much for progress, right?
What a wonderful piece, thanks for sending it to me Andy. We had neighborhood routes every day, and in my neighborhood it meant schlepping up and down some huge hills and lots of stairs to individual houses navigating our way past different dogs along the way. Then once a month we had to go back to each house usually in the evenings to collect the $3 or $4 dollars a monthly subscription was. Yes this was a long time ago. Thanks for your comment. Take care.
I read the newspaper every day until about 2004. We're not missing much though. The writing is mostly terrible. I can stomach the Sunday NYT if it wasn't like 7 bucks.
From the age of 6 in school, I had a weekly current affairs class and so had to keep a log. Each week I would cut out and paste one story and tell my teacher about it. It could be anything from major world news to celebrity gossip - whatever interested a 6-year old mind. But it fed my love of reading newspapers. The newspaper shop was only a few doors away from us so every morning I would go to buy the daily. Now, even the Sunday newspaper here in Lexington is a thin ghost of its former self. Major media conglomerates have bought them out. But one of my favourite things to do is still to pore through the microfiches in the library of old papers. I love the old social sections where the whole town would know that you had out-of-town visitors or that someone came to dinner. Priceless.
Fellow ink-stained wretch here. Newspapers were my lifeblood for almost four decades. My debut novel is a love letter to the newsrooms of yore. Thanks for bringing back memories, Kelley.
I am looking forward to reading your novel.
The comics were my favorite, but the smell was also intoxicating.
I still read Willamette Week & sometimes the Oregonian, online. then there are the few local, San Francisco newsfeeds too.
This is a great and much needed post, Kelley! It's really sad just how bad newspapers have become today. Like the newspapers you read growing up, ours here in Nebraska are also a shadow of what they used to be; and, get this, they print the same stories in multiple online papers because they're all owned by the same conglomerate! Also, when I was a kid, my favorite section wasn't the comics; it was the entertainment section. I loved to look at all the full page ads for movies that were playing in town or coming soon. Recently, I've been doing research online through a website that lets you look at digital copies of old newspapers. They were so much better written back then, even better than the online "news" websites we have today. Oh well, so much for progress, right?
What an amazing time in life... being a kid shelling papers. Aspen was much different the Portland. Thought you might get a kick out of what it was like for me. One of my friends the wrote the last chapter of our book was Lo Semple... who's dad wrote all the Batman TV episodes. Here is his spin on being a paper boy in Aspen back in the day. https://www.aspendailynews.com/opinion/semple-i-was-a-times-paperboy/article_d35eb960-25ae-11ed-9ce6-97f98128cfae.html
What a wonderful piece, thanks for sending it to me Andy. We had neighborhood routes every day, and in my neighborhood it meant schlepping up and down some huge hills and lots of stairs to individual houses navigating our way past different dogs along the way. Then once a month we had to go back to each house usually in the evenings to collect the $3 or $4 dollars a monthly subscription was. Yes this was a long time ago. Thanks for your comment. Take care.
I read the newspaper every day until about 2004. We're not missing much though. The writing is mostly terrible. I can stomach the Sunday NYT if it wasn't like 7 bucks.
From the age of 6 in school, I had a weekly current affairs class and so had to keep a log. Each week I would cut out and paste one story and tell my teacher about it. It could be anything from major world news to celebrity gossip - whatever interested a 6-year old mind. But it fed my love of reading newspapers. The newspaper shop was only a few doors away from us so every morning I would go to buy the daily. Now, even the Sunday newspaper here in Lexington is a thin ghost of its former self. Major media conglomerates have bought them out. But one of my favourite things to do is still to pore through the microfiches in the library of old papers. I love the old social sections where the whole town would know that you had out-of-town visitors or that someone came to dinner. Priceless.