The sun would rise over the Rockies, and Robin Gammons would run to the front porch to grab the morning paper before school.
She wanted comics and her father wanted sports, but the Montana standard meant more than their daily race to catch “Calvin and Hobbes” or baseball scores. When one of the three kids made the honor roll, won a basketball game or wore a recently killed bison for the History Club, appearing in the pages of the Standard made the achievement feel more real. Robin became an artist with a one woman show in a downtown gallery and the front page article went on the fridge too. Five years later, the yellow object is still there.
The Montana Standard reduced print circulation to three days a week two years ago, reducing the cost of printing like 1,200 American newspapers over the past two decades. About 3,500 papers closed at the same time. An average of two a week have closed this year.
This slow fade, it turns out, means more than a change in news habits. It speaks directly to the presence of the newspaper in our lives — not just in terms of the information printed on it, but in its identity as a physical object with many other uses.
“You can pass it on. You can keep it. And then, of course, there’s all the fun stuff,” says Diane DeBlois, one of the founders of the Ephemera Society of America, a group of scholars, researchers, dealers and collectors who focus on what they call “precious primary source information.”
“Newspapers wrapped fish. They washed windows. They appeared in the outside, “she says. “And – free toilet paper.”
The downturn in the media business has changed American democracy over the past two decades — some think for the better, many for the worse. What is indisputable: The gradual decline of the printed paper — the item that so many millions read to inform themselves and then reuse in the workflows of the house — has quietly changed the fabric of daily life.
American democracy and pet cages
People would catch up with the world, then save their precious memories, protect their floor and furniture, wrap gifts, line pet cages and light fires. In Butte, in San Antonio, Texas, in much of New Jersey and around the world, lives without the printed paper are only slightly different.
For newspaper publishers, the cost of printing is too high in an industry that is under pressure in an online society. For ordinary people, physical paper is joining the pay phone, the cassette tape, the answering machine, the bank cheque, the sound of the internal combustion engine and the pair of ivory white ladies’ gloves as objects whose disappearance marks the passage of time.
“It’s very hard to see it while it’s happening, much easier to see things like this even modestly in retrospect,” says Marilyn Nissensson, co-author of “Going Going Gone: Vanishing Americana.” “Young women would go to work and wear them for a while and then one day they looked at them and thought, ‘This is ridiculous.’ That was a small icon but one that speaks for a much bigger social change.”
Nick Mathews thinks a lot about newspapers. Both of his parents worked at the Peking (Illinois) Daily Times. He went on to become sports editor of the Houston Chronicle and, now, an assistant professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism.
“I have fond memories of my parents using newspapers to wrap presents,” he says. “In my family, you always knew the gift was from my parents because of what it was wrapped in.”
In Houston, he recalled recently, the Chronicle reliably sold out when the Astros, Rockets or Texas won a championship because so many people wanted the paper as a souvenir.
Four years ago, Mathews interviewed 19 people in Caroline County, Virginia, about the 2018 cover of the Caroline Progress, a 99-year-old weekly paper that was closed months before its 100th anniversary.
In “Print Imprint: The Connection Between the Physical Newspaper and the Self,” published in the Journal of Communication Inquiry, wistful Virginians remember their senior high school photo and the picture of their daughter in a wedding dress that appears in Progress. In addition, one told Mathews, “My fingers are too clean now. I feel sad without ink stains.”
The uses are many and varied
Flush with cash from Omahans who invested years ago with local boy Warren Buffett, Nebraska Wildlife Rehab is a well-equipped center for migratory waterfowl, wading birds, reptiles, foxes, bobcats, coyotes, mink and beaver.
“We get over 8,000 animals every year and we use that newspaper for almost all of those animals,” says Executive Director Laura Stastny.
Having old newspapers was never a problem in this close Midwestern town. However Stastny worries about the electronic future.
“We do pretty well now,” she says. “If we lost that source and had to use something else or have to buy something, that, with the available options we have now, would easily cost us more than $10,000 a year.”
That would be almost 1% of the budget, Stastny says, but “I’ve never been in a position to be without them, so I might be shocked at a higher dollar figure.”
Until 1974, the Omaha World-Herald printed a morning and two afternoon editions, including a late afternoon Wall Street Edition with closing prices.
“Afternoon major league baseball was still standard at the time, so I got to get into both baseball and stock market facts,” Buffett, 85, told the World-Herald in 2013. By then, he had become the world’s most famous investor and paper owner.
The World-Herald ended its second afternoon edition in 2016 and Buffett left the newspaper business five years ago. Fewer than 60,000 households get the paper today, according to Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, down from nearly more than 190,000 in 2005, or about one per household.
Time moves on
Few places symbolize the shift from print to digital more than Akalla, a district of Stockholm where the ST01 data center sits on a site once occupied by the factory that prints Sweden’s main newspaper, says Kaun.
“They have fewer and fewer machines, and instead the building is taken up more and more by this co-location data center,” she says.
Data centers use large amounts of energy, of course, and the environmental benefit of using less printing paper is also offset by the enormous popularity of online shopping.
“You will see a decrease in printed papers, but there is a big increase in packaging,” says Cecilia Alcoreza, manager, forest sector transformation for the World Wildlife Fund.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution announced in August that it would stop providing a print edition at the end of the year and go completely digital, making Atlanta the largest US metro area without a daily print newspaper.
The habit of following the news — to be informed about the world — cannot be divorced from the existence of print, says Anne Kaun, professor of media and communication studies at Södertörn University in Stockholm.
Children who grew up in homes with printed newspapers and magazines casually found news and socialized into a news-reading habit, Kaun observed. With mobile phones, this does not happen.
“I think it significantly changes how we relate to each other, how we relate to things like news. It’s reshaping attention spans and communications,” says Sarah Wasserman, a cultural critic and assistant dean at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire who specializes in changing forms of communication.
“These things will always continue to exist in certain spheres and certain pockets and certain niches of class,” she says. “But I think they are disappearing.”