Newspapers...almost kaput

Newspapers: Precious, essential and just about kaput

By Fred Bruning

Dec. 3, 2023

Surveys show that young Americans favor social media as a news source – YouTube, Tik Tok, Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat rated tops in one study – which is something like Dick Tracy getting World War 2 updates through his two-way wrist radio.

I will not go into a whole, weepy newspaper lament here, but it is hard to imagine that 21-year-olds pay close attention to, say, the recent battle for Speaker of the House or latest debt ceiling crisis on a platform that can as easily display videos of spring break at Daytona Beach or the singer Ariana Grande’s wedding pictures. At one point, the picture of an egg – an egg! – earned the most “likes” on Instagram (at least 55 million), surpassing, just then, snapshots posted by celebrity mom Kylie Jenner of her infant daughter.

Oh, all right, I will bark about the newspaper, but only a bit.

In Brooklyn, my parents and I lived in a six-family apartment house on 69^th Street owned by my grandmother, who occupied the first floor, front. First floor, back, we find my Aunt Dellie and her two adult daughters, Rena and “Little Dellie.”

Top floor front was Mom, Dad, me and a 10-inch, black-and-white RCA television in a cabinet that took up most of the living room and, if emptied of its electronic innards, might have been used for evidence disposal after a mafia hit.

During the week, my father brought home one of the tabloids – News, Post, Mirror – he read on the subway after delivering Bond Bread to delis and diners in Park Slope.

On Sunday, I was dispatched to Becker’s candy store on Sixth Avenue, for the New York Times requested by Rena and Little Dellie, who worked in Manhattan and had sophisticated tastes, and the Daily News and Journal American for Mom and Dad, who had fewer.

My grandmother, Nana, didn’t do much reading, but busied herself dusting and cleaning and cooking lunch for me when I came home from grade school – five hamburgers in one record-setting day, but that is a story for another time.

Throughout the week, the papers – the Times, News, Journal American – circulated among family members, top floor and first.  Sections remained scattered around our little Honeymooner-sized apartments until the weekend, when, on Sunday, the whole routine would begin again.

Though an academically disinclined young fellow, who only a few short years later would, sadly for his adoring parents, flunk out of high school and finish at night – even this uncertain soul knew the newspaper was something precious and essential, or why, every evening, would adults spend hours with it on their laps?

I ended up working in the news trade – a miracle given what I have admitted above – and, after 60 years on the job, hate to see newspapers eaten alive by millennial economic factors and the Internet and, Craig’s List, and, you know, all those inscrutable apps.

But why complain? The future is well upon us. Daily newspapers – what a reporter friend calls the foldable, “dead trees” version – are nearly kaput and bound for an eternity in cyberspace.  The online edition – sigh.

And so, yes – yes! – it is better that the grandkids acquire some grasp of global affairs and world leaders, and by any means. Name the leader of Canada, you might inquire. Identify, if you can, the capital of Ukraine. With what Asian leader did Joe Biden (the American president) meet last month in California? No luck? Sorry.

I do not mean to malign an entire generation of fine, young Americans. I love their energy and open-mindedness and sense of fairness to all people. I love that they have made torn blue jeans a fashion statement and that on the coldest winter days, they roam the Earth in gym shorts. I love that they work hard at jobs that should pay more and still manage a smile when handing you a bean burrito.

They deserve newspapers that do not light up on little screens, a chance to engage the world, page by crinkly page, to not be distracted by so much that means so little.

We heard recently of a young woman who thought Honduras was in Europe. It’s not, of course.  Honduras is in Central America, south of Daytona Beach.