An ode to Mary Hopkin: “Those were the days my friend, we thought they’d never end. . .”
Recent Durango Heralds contained a number of items I saved for my adult daughter, who lives nearby but does not subscribe to our local three-days-a-week newspaper.
She and her boyfriend are fly fishers so I’ve clipped a Don Oliver column, “Fly fish, eat, sleep times six.” As he’s a comics fan, I saved the colorful The Funday Sunnies section. Since she’s interested in wildlife, I’ve saved for her various pieces on wolverines. Too, I’ve saved all of the Herald’s many wolves stories for my daughter.
And as we often discuss – and debate – the Second Amendment, I cut out Andrew Gulliford’s thought-provoking opinion column from a while back, “NRA, the U.S. Supreme Court and the public trust.” Then there’s Jim Cross’s April guest column on boomers.
But in an earlier era, well before she was born, I would have sat around the Sunday breakfast table in northern Ohio with my parents and brothers as we all read, shared and often argued over our daily newspapers to which the family subscribed – Cleveland Plain Dealer, Cleveland Press, Lorain Journal, Elyria Chronicle-Telegram and the Christian Science Monitor.
Now can you imagine any family today subscribing to five daily newspapers?
While these news organizations generally still have some sort of online presence, the:
* Plain Dealer, Ohio’s largest newspaper, prints and delivers papers only four days a week.
* Cleveland Press shuttered its operation in 1982.
* Morning (Lorain) Journal prints a very small daily paper.
* Chronicle Telegram no longer has a Sunday paper.
* Christian Science Monitor publishes only a weekly magazine.
Yes, the U.S. was daily-print-newspaper rich some 70 years ago. A time before changing reading habits, advertising revenue, social media, online news and a host of other trends that ate away at print newspapers’ viability.
And yes, we’ve all heard – and occasionally read about – the hundreds of U.S. newspapers that have bitten the journalistic dust in recent years.
And yes, I’m aware that we can keep at least somewhat informed by monitoring National Public Radio, The New York Times and a variety of information sources on our cellphones.
But I miss the world in which parents and their children would have met, read and discussed together subscriptions of daily Durango Heralds, and a host of other newspapers.
Instead, as I write this, I’m waiting for my daughter to pop by so I might hand her the recent print items I’ve saved and clipped in recent weeks. Sigh.
William Babcock, is former senior international news editor for the Christian Science Monitor, when it was a print daily newspaper.
