Will it matter when the last newspaper dies?

I'm on the road this week, which is making me a little nostalgic.

Brian Toohey, one of the last great Fairfax editors, once told me the story of the Forgotten Correspondent. Brian had flown to the US as part of the press pack trailing after some visiting prime minister or other. Having landed at LAX, he was greeted somewhat sheepishly by the resident foreign correspondent for House Fairfax, who implored him not to remind anybody back in Sydney that Fairfax had a resident foreign correspondent in Los Angeles. It seemed they had forgotten about him many years ago but were still paying handsomely to cover his bar tab there.

The good old days were long gone by the time I submitted my invoices. It’s not unusual now for reporters to have to cover expenses out of their own pocket for months at a time, and not unknown for those spendies to never be repaid.

Executive compensation remains generous, however.

It’s not just a Fairfax thing; it’s everywhere. I filed a lot of freelance copy for Murdoch and was always impressed at how promptly the old monster paid his bills. Took a leaf out of the Lannister’s book, I suppose. But even at the News Corps Death Star, the hungry times grow worse.

There will come a day in our lives when the last newspaper, on actual paper, is sent out on the trucks.

There will come a day sometime after that when whatever the old houses evolved into, finally fall into ruin and silence.

Will it matter?

I used to love newspapers the way you can’t help but love someone who is there for you every day, with all of their flaws and contradictions, whether you want them around or not. And I do mean papers, on actual paper, not just pixels and algorithms.

My parents had two papers delivered on weekdays. The Queensland Times, which was really just the local chip wrapper for the small town in which I grew up, and the Courier-Mail, once a broadsheet, now a Murdoch tabloid, and forever a champion of the overdog.

On weekends loftier fare arrived in thicker slabs of thinky content, so much reading that wherever you went in the house some lift-out or supplement or review section awaited your indulgence.

You could easily spend hours every weekend browsing these papers without being measurably worse off for the experience. One of yesterday’s pleasures was to find a newspaper left behind in a cafe or on a train, a small windfall you could leave the house and reasonably anticipate. When I lived down the hill from Kings Cross in Sydney it was my favourite thing of a Sunday night to walk up to the Tropicana Café for a shortbread and coffee and a free read of the Sunday Age, which in those days stood apart from the weekday edition and was undeniably better for the separation.

About a year ago, during a quick run for a caffeine hit, I spied an abandoned copy of The Australian in a café and picked it up out of morbid curiosity. I’ll never get back those two minutes of my life.

I don’t know if Rupe even owns newspapers in the US, but he famously owns most of the papers here, and it’s partly why I can’t find much sadness in my heart when I contemplate their inevitable demise.

The thing I loved died long ago.

But in a way, the internet is not the death of the newspaper, but the rebirth. When the free press was born, midwifed into being by Benjamin Franklin, it looked nothing like the massive corporate media conglomerates which now dominate the planet even as they struggle through their very own extinction event. The free press once looked like something a lot closer to early days of the blogosphere, with an horde of amateurs, some gifted, most hapless, doing whatever the hell they wanted, talking to small audiences about the stuff that interested them.

Platforms like Substack are very eighteenth century. The technology that destroys, also creates. It was once impossible to set up a newspaper unless you had a lazy hundred million lying around. That’s why newspapers tended to be owned by blokes with a lazy hundred million lying around. That’s why newspapers tended to represent the interests and protect the power of blokes with a lazy hundred million, or more, lying around. Are you one of these fine fellows? If so, hit me up in my DMs and we’ll discuss the large unsecured loan you’re about to advance me. If not, then there is no barrier to you entering the marketplace of ideas and reportage anymore.

But not on paper, sadly.

That does still need a printing press, trucks and something like a newsstand at the other end to take delivery.

It’s why there may come a day and not far off when the very last paper rolls off the presses. The last big, commercial metro paper, at least. Perhaps, like vinyl music, there might persist a small, market for hyper-local daily information, something like the old Queensland Times that used to lie on our breakfast table every day when I was growing up. Probably not. It’s probably just the romantic in me yearning for what’s already gone.

But I do miss those Sunday nights with a decent coffee and a jammy dunker, reading the Sunday Age. A screen is convenient, and powerful even, but it isn’t the same. If I’m being honest, the thing I miss isn’t the feel of a newspaper between my fingertips, it’s the singular focus of reading an artifact you couldn’t scroll or swipe away from. You were there, sitting in that moment, and nowhere else.

That’s what’s been lost.