A cold drizzle had started which suited the morning’s bad news, that 10 more people were losing their jobs at the local newspaper. My newspaper. Our newspaper. A friend and I stood in the park under umbrellas and grieved. It was a surprise, but no shock. This story of layoffs, cutbacks and general shrinkage throughout the industry keeps rewriting itself.

My friend teaches a college course on the media. He used to require his students to read a daily newspaper, not just to study the craft but to stimulate discussion of the news. The need to stay informed was a given. He was sad that morning and wondered who will write the final obituary for newspapers.

But then, only a few days later, newspapers rose from their deathbed and became the hottest thing on the street. Newspaper boxes were cleaned out. It was not “new” news. We’d known what happened since we went to bed the night before. Deadline-wise it was old news, but it was what people rushed to read in their newspapers. Maybe for some it made the election more real. Maybe they just couldn’t get enough of the words: President-Elect Obama.

It was a verification, to see it in print. To have and to hold the history-making proof. With a historic photo and historic headline, officially validated by a newspaper publication date – Wednesday, Nov. 5, 2008. Maybe to frame. Certainly to keep as a souvenir , for children and grandchildren. It was made even better when you saw the front pages of newspapers from around the world. Same news, same face, all languages.

Newspapers help make us part of the whole.

We have a group of photos and prints on our living room wall that is a kind of homage to newspapers. There’s one of a newspaper kiosk in San Francisco that’s part of a mural at Coit Tower. There’s a man framed in a window reading a paper, painted by Sausalito artist Joe Jaqua. We have a sketch from a street artist in France that shows two men, one in a suit, one in a beret, sharing a newspaper on a bench. There’s a man in a green sweater with his newspaper in Pamplona, Spain. One of my favorites is a postcard print from Prague of a woman reading a paper in striped pajamas and smoking a cigarette.

We have them because my husband and I were both in the biz. But I also like the body language of someone engaged with their newspaper, whisked away by some story that has taken them out of their private world.

Newspapers help make us part of the whole. You can get that on the internet, too, but people do a lot more select reading on the web. You go to your favorite sites to talk about your favorite subject and there’s not as much chance that your eyes will unexpectedly be drawn to a totally different subject on the same page.

The media took a lot of hits in this last election season – print and every other kind. Those who didn’t like what was said about them complained about the media elite. If the media were really elite, wouldn’t newspapers be getting a bail-out? Most members of the media are commoners. They do it not for money, but for love of the profession. I find myself defending them a lot lately as they struggle heroically to put out a good, strong product, working long days with dwindling budgets, fewer staff, disappearing ad revenue and doomsday critics saying newspapers are dead.

But, not so fast. They could live again. As newspaper readers on Nov. 5, 2008 can attest, miracles do happen.

Image Courtesy of The Press Democrat

Tags: barack_obama, Juicy_Tomatoes, media_elite, Susan_Swartz

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 at 8:11 pm and is filed under Media, Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.