ShareThisThe news for newspapers hasn't been good lately. Circulation has been in decline for years, partly because the people who grew up using newspapers as their primary news source are in decline as well, and the Internet beguiles young readers. Recent bad news includes the bankruptcy of the Tribune Co., owner of The Los Angeles Times, and the curtailment of home delivery by two Detroit dailies, a sure sign of impending slow death.
Readers of a certain age regret the decline of newspapers; I'm one of them, and I suspect that if you're reading this column in a newspaper, you are, too. Maybe this feeling is mere nostalgia; nevertheless, indulge me in a 500-word reflection on this troubled medium.
Consider two newspapers that, for some reason, have been lying on my cluttered desk in my cluttered office for several years: The Wichita Beacon and The Wichita Eagle, both published on Thursday, July 15, 1948.
More than 60 years old, both papers are yellowed and somewhat brittle, slightly fragile, and crumbling a little around the edges, but, like Shakespeare's 400-year-old folios, perfectly readable.
The first thing you notice is that these papers are big, true "broadsheets." To economize on newsprint, modern papers have trimmed their pages: the San Antonio Express-News, for example, measures 12 inches by 22; both old Wichita papers are a full 16 by 24 inches.
Even more remarkable: there are two of them. Wichita, Kan., had a population of fewer than 170,000 in 1948, but between 1872 and 1980 it supported two competitive papers. Eventually, the Eagle won out, and Wichita, following a national pattern of newspaper consolidation, became a one-newspaper town.
The big news on July 15, 1948, in both papers, was appropriately local: A violent storm had blown through the day before, and the Beacon announced the event in one-inch headlines. Storm damage mounted into the millions and a man was killed. Both papers covered the event extensively with stories and photos.
In 1948, the newspaper represented the chief source of national news for most citizens. The front page of both papers announced the death, at 87, of General "Black Jack" Pershing, who led American troops to victory in World War I. Harry Truman had been nominated by the Democrats to run against Republican Thomas Dewey. The Southern Democrats were threatening to abandon the party in objection to a civil rights plank in the platform that included anti-lynching and anti-poll tax legislation.
The Soviets were blockading Berlin, and the United States and Britain had made 500 relief flights during the previous 24 hours. An Eagle headline reports: "Jews Rout Egyptians Where Sampson Defeated Philistines."
So the world went in 1948. Inside the papers are reports of local deaths, births, and graduations. Eleanor Roosevelt writes a column on traveling with a dog. The comics. A crossword puzzle completed by a long-dead or now-very-old reader. At the movies, Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn are starring in "State of the Union," along with Van Johnson, who died recently at 92. The names of the movie theatres are capped with snow to indicate that audiences will luxuriate in an innovation: air-conditioning.
If newspapers disappear, I suspect our culture will suffer from the loss of the depth and deliberation of their news reporting; so far, television and the Internet haven't come close. If the investigation and analysis currently provided almost solely by newspapers isn't provided in some other way, we will be a shallower, less informed society.
But I'll miss the newspaper as a tangible artifact thrown into my driveway every morning, a durable snapshot of our society, taken locally and nationally 1,500 times a day, the daily state of the nation fixed in time. To encounter an old newspaper is to be in touch -- literally -- with history. I wonder how today's digital news sources and blogs will look to us, 60 years from now.
(John M. Crisp teaches in the English Department at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas. Email: jcrisp(at)delmar.edu. For more stories visit scrippsnews.com.)
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