Sadness for things lost to time: long form Sunday paper

I was a paperboy from age 11 to 15. You weren’t supposed to get a route until you were 12, but I was a “legacy carrier” since one of my older brothers went on to a “real” job and I inherited his route. Bob Carstetter, the manager just sort of looked the other way.

Speaking of another casualty of time, mine was for the afternoon paper, plus I carried most of my cutomer’s Sunday morning paper too.

It was a pretty good gig and it gave me alot of “walking around” money. Dad always made us deposit half of our job money for college but the other half was all mine to do with as I wished.

My Mom loved the LA Times Sunday Calendar section. It was a literary world unto itself. I would pour over all the movie ads. Now the LA Times is barely larger than the Daily Breeze used to be.

I think in the first internet wave of journalist destruction, about 50% of journalists were laid off, including my friend. I wonder how mAIny AIre left.

I used to get the Sunday paper for the comics and the grocery coupons. At first, coupons were plentiful and if the store doubled you could save a lot of money. Then that went away, then coupons were fewer and fewer. Stores started putting coupons on their apps instead and comics became available online.

I still subscribe to the online paper and I get the weekly hometown paper for my mom to keep up with stuff at home but it’s several weeks behind by mail.

Things lost to time: typewriters, both manual and electric. Had a few in storage. Guess they’re still there, unless replaced by piles of iron oxide.
Even had an IBM Selectric, equipped to connect to a computer (RS-232? or that other thing? Centronics something?) Used to trawl eBay looking for cheap print balls.
Ink ribbons still available?
(Too lazy at the moment to look anything up.)
Where’s the WD40?

Anyone else use the Sunday comics as giftwrapping paper? We did a time or two.

We’re a print newspaper family…or at least one of us is. Me? I do a lot of my reading on-line on a desktop with a giant TV for a monitor. But I still read the local county papers in print form.

The SO reads or rather used to read the local metro area daily and the NYTimes (7-day/week subscriptions for both) every day from front to back. But as of Dec 31, 2025 the local metro paper is no more in the print version, and the NYTimes is now mailed to us daily (sometimes up to 3 days late).

Our faithful newspaper delivery guy for the past few years is now out of work. His predecessor saw the handwriting on the wall and went into the car towing service business. Both were excellent and highly dependable in getting our papers to us each and every day in the wee hours of the morning.

The SO got a large screen iPad for Xmas to read the local metro, but that isn’t going well. The iPad sits on the kitchen table ignored and unused.

We did start subscribing to the local county newspaper and to the adjacent county paper as well. Both come in the mail on Wednesday and Saturday, if we’re lucky, given the vagaries of the US Postal Service in these parts.

But these local rags? They aren’t the same. They are very, very provincial and as a result only a few pages from front to back. The politics they espouse are most disagreeable in this household.

I worked for a time for a company that supplied the paper industry back in the '80s and '90s. It was said then that the newspaper industry was doomed. I heard that a lot.

There were technical shifts in pulp production with the introduction of mechanical and ground wood pulps which used minimal chemicals to remove lignins. Inks got cheaper and cheaper, being reduced to mostly carbon black in an oil carrier. That’s why your hands and clothing sometimes got black when you read a paper in recent years. Color printing was still around but you saw less and less of it as that was more expensive than b/w.

Indeed the physical size of the newspapers did shrink quite a bit in the intervening decades. To realize just how much smaller recent newspapers are, you only need to physically pick up an old paper from the '60s or '70s.

Gone are the Thursday and Sunday inserts that were such a pain when I was delivering the local metro afternoon paper for a while when I was in college in the early '60s (58 mile afternoon, daily driving route.)

Adverts were a primary income stream for papers, and still support the county papers to a goodly extent. And I suppose the classifieds, especially the legal sections as the local “paper of record” helps the paper’s income streams as well.

I don’t think younger people are newspaper or magazine readers, for that matter.

It all boils down to a single thing, I think. That thing is “attention.”

One only has so much attention. Your focus or attention is mostly singular in nature and collectively is the one of the most valuable things in the world.

Despite what you may or may not believe multi-taskers, who pride themselves on being able to do several things at once, are really just good at rapidly switching their focus. But in the end, they are really doing just one thing at a time with their attention, though it might be only a very brief time.

Phones, tablets, computers, TV, radio, magazines, newspapers, and many, many other things are all in competition for your attention. Sadly, newspapers (and magazines too) are losing the battle.

I’ve noticed the disappearance of newspapers and magazines too in professional waiting rooms (doctor, dentist, hospital, health professional, and other professional services).

Everyone in those rooms is bent over their phone for the most part.

Watch someone enter the area, select a seat and immediately retrieve their phone to tune in and drop out, while passing the time.

Newspapers? I sure hope that they don’t disappear for good. In spite of all their faults and problems, there is something about having a physical printed record as opposed to a highly mutable, insubstantial, ephemeral, digital image or something or other that is invaluable.