Dan's Papers - July 3, 2009

Before we consider what is wrong with newspapers, we should consider what is RIGHT with them. They are, for one thing, a great natural resource. Without them, forests around the world, uncut, would grow wild and out of control, soon consuming cities and all we hold dear in the world. Large dangerous animals would range through our foliage choked cities. There would be no place safe. Children would be at risk. Everything would be destroyed.

Another thing that is right about newspapers is the sense of great intelligence others attribute to a person carrying a newspaper folded up under his arm. Everyone knows that here is a man, or woman, informed of things in great depth, a person who has exhausted all opinion on the right and left, is serenely unaware of the outcome of last night's baseball game or the new catastrophe that befell a small South American nation earlier in the morning and is thus free of emotional turmoil. People such as these have the balance and common sense to make accurate and well thought out judgments about whatever might be coming up later in the day. Gravitas excelsior, as they say in Latin, or something. Such people are held in high regard.

We now turn to what is wrong with newspapers.

To coin a pun, it needs to be said that although such people as those above have their finger on the pulse of the world, they also have their finger on the ink of the newspaper. Such fingers are often smudged. Ink applied to paper, even here in the 21st century, smudges. It is a fact. And in an age of liquid soap, Brazilian body waxes and other examples of fastidious personal hygiene, the smudged ink fingers are an unpleasant minus.

Another thing wrong with newspapers is that stories in them often do not end on the page they begin. One is left searching for page 13. Often one forgets what was being explained on page 1.

Still another thing wrong with newspapers is the fact that to turn the pages, considerable physical effort has to be exerted. In an age when Americans are so sedentary that treadmills are rampant, it would be understandable that a populace that has to strain to reach way out to fold one page behind another, given the difficulties of the fact that they frequently hang up or crumple when folded, would turn away from such products.

And newspapers can hurt you. Who among us has not experienced, while fighting to fold a newspaper in a strong wind to read the continuation of a hot and heavy account of the dalliance of a mistress with a sitting governor, to discover that there has been a paper cut suffered? The amount of blood consumed dealing with paper cuts since the invention of the Gutenberg press would stretch all the way around the world. It's a fact.

And then there is rain, the archenemy of newspapers. Your picture may be in one. Try peeling the pages of a newspaper that has been left out in the rain even for a minute apart. One does not have this problem on the Internet.

Newspapers, unlike the Internet, need to be disposed of. Newspapers often just linger unfashionably in living rooms, and then pile up in stacks in the corners. Who among us has not found atop a stack of newspapers the account of a governor who had resigned earlier in the day, now still in office having a shocking never before revealed dalliance with his mistress? Such reports of slovenly and unkempt rooms of old newspapers are rampant. There are even sad stories of the elderly and infirm, so addicted to their newspapers that they have died from having giant stacks of these old newspapers clogging every room in their houses fall upon them. What can I say?

And proper disposal can be costly. There is no longer an "away," as there once was, when you could just throw something away. "Away" now means burial in some landfill, but if the landfill is now a mountain, it means trucking the newspapers to landfills in Indiana, where they welcome higher elevations. This is a very costly and un-environmentally friendly procedure.

Some people consume their old newspapers by burning them in their fireplaces. But unlike logs, they tend to unfold and fly around, often out of the fireplaces and onto the floors, setting off the smoke alarms. Having your house burn down is a dreadful cost to pay for getting your news in a newspaper, rather than on the Internet. Most people just won't do it.

Sections of newspapers, as mentioned before, sometimes fly off in a strong wind. The thought of the possible guilt experienced from that littering due to leaving newspapers unattended, together with the anticipation of possible failure to finish the continuation of an important read, are frustrations that also often turn people from the thought of buying newspapers.

And newspapers frequently provide only the wise analysis of the news from one or two handpicked writers. Though these people may be experts in their field, or important relatives of the management, newspapers are no longer able to compete with the dozens and sometimes millions of opinions offered about the news on the Internet by people who have the intellectual level of stadium loads of baseball fans screaming in defiance of a particular umpire's call. This is not a fair fight. Newspapers lose.

Newspapers are also no longer considered chic. You do not see Justin Timberlake carrying a newspaper. You do not see Paris Hilton carrying a newspaper. No effort has ever been made by newspaper companies to promote their products by hiring Scarlett Johanssen or Shaquille O'Neal to hawk their wares.

Nor have newspapers taken heed of "hotspots." People eager for information cluster in "hotspots," but they are not there to read newspapers, they are there to load up pods of information onto their laptops.

The solution to the problem of newspapers is obvious.

Newspapers should be printed with nonsmudgeable laser beams on paper rolled up into toiletpaper like packages and then placed conveniently on wooden racks in stores everywhere around the country, where eager readers can unroll them and read articles from beginning to end without interruption. People will wait patiently in lines to read newspapers in these circumstances, just as they wait patiently in lines at public restrooms. And if they cannot wait, they will move on to other stores to find other less traveled "hotspots" where they can do so.

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie should be photographed carrying rolls under their arms by paparazzi. Michelle Obama and Lance Armstrong should be photographed carrying rolls under their arms. Thus will newspapers rise again.