Remembering when newspapers mattered

I was thinking about my father recently.

He died on a Sunday in March, and one of the unreported facts about his death was that on that day, the Sunday New York Times lost a long-time reader. I never knew anyone who valued his Sunday paper more than my father, but it wasn't just any paper.

It had to be the Times.

When I was younger, no matter where we were in the country, one thing my dad always did was scout out a place where he would be able to get the Times on Sunday. That may not seem like a big deal now, when anyone can subscribe to the national edition of the paper, but in the late '50s and the '60s, he often had to drive 20 or 30 miles on a Sunday to be able to get a copy and read all the news that was fit to print.

Even though he lived in a city that had one of the best newspapers in the country, the Washington Post, it wasn't enough. I always thought the Post was a pretty good paper, but it wasn't just pride in the city of his birth that kept my dad reading the Times. As he pointed out to me, what other paper covered science the way it did? What other paper had editors for things like gardening, stamp collecting or chess?

Easy answer.

None.

I'm sure it made it easier in his later years when he could have the Sunday Times delivered to his doorstep, right along with his daily Washington Post. I know every time I visited and was there on a Sunday, part of his day included reading the paper.

He knew that newspapers mattered, that television news was only a highly limited collection of headlines, and that anyone interested in more than just the lead paragraph of a story should be reading a good newspaper.

I'm pretty sure his love for newspapers had something to do with the fact that I read at least one and usually two or three newspapers daily, and that I have become a consumer of newspapers from all over the country and the world on the Internet.

I know it had something to do with the fact that I became a journalist as a career. He was the one who taught me that covering the news mattered.

I never really got the chance to talk to him about what the Dean Singletons and the Sam Zells are doing to the newspaper business. I think he would agree with me that the increasing dumbness in the country is closely related to the fact that so many people have stopped reading newspapers or simply never acquired the habit.

Something is going to have to take their place, and I don't mean blogging, "citizen journalism" or news on the 'net. Otherwise, we're halfway to becoming eloi, and if you don't know what that means, you probably don't read much.

Newspapers mattered.

They need to matter again.