In the late 1960s, I was a paper boy. I delivered the
now-defunct Toronto Telegram on Saturdays to home subscribers in Owen Sound,
Ontario, and loved to accompany my pal, Greg Dunham, on his daily route,
delivering the Owen Sound Sun Times. Ten years later, I would work at the Sun
Times as a cub reporter, and inevitably find myself in the newsboy and newsgirl
room, where the papers – hot off the press – were stacked before they were
picked up after school for home delivery.
I’ve been in the news business now through almost four
decades, reporting and editing for weeklies and dailies, mostly. From the
Prescott Journal weekly in Eastern Ontario to the Chelsea Clinton News weekly in
West Side Manhattan to the Wall Street Journal to, currently, the New York
Post.
At work, I write on a computer now – originally paper in a
typewriter – but I don’t read the finished product on one. I’ve tried but it’s
ink that runs in my veins so I read newspapers and hardback and paperback books.
When it comes to something beyond one hundred words, I print it out. For me the
type isn’t real unless I can run my fingers over the page. Especially when it
comes to papers. I know too much about headlines and body text, about “widows”
and “orphans.” I know when a headline will fit. There are no headlines on the Internet.
When I’m running in the park, I think at times the trees are
shuddering when I pass. For those with a bent toward environmentalism, as a
lifelong newsman I’ve been a party to the killing of hundreds of thousands of
trees. Not something I’m proud of.
The millions of screen readers aren’t a threat to trees. But
they are a threat to the beauty of long form writing. With the change in
reading delivery systems – from real books to e-books, from newspapers to news
websites – comes a restriction to an elimination of a certain kind of writing.
The shorter attention span of screen readers spawns ever briefer fiction, ever
sparer news items. Keep it busy, keep it moving.
Me, I long to return to a slow afternoon in the newspaper
supply room, the papers piling up. Failing that, there’s nothing better
than sitting down with a cup of coffee and reading the paper, if it’s a good
one, every single article on every single page.
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