One thing we've lost, which rarely gets mentioned, is how physically reading a newspaper exposed you to articles on topics you might not have known about or been interested in otherwise. You want to read the article on page 13? That means glancing through 12 pages of other articles before you get there, and the one on a new form of Arctic warfare on page 10 might catch your eye and change your life’s direction or shift your opinion on something significant.
It’s similar to how Amazon has killed the joy of discovering new books on the shelves of a physical bookstore. When you only look for what you're already interested in, you miss out on the rest of the world. Physical newspapers made you look. And that’s something real we’re all going to be worse off for.
After 40 years at the chalkface (OK, chalkface, whiteboard and tablet, it was a long career) the thing I miss is knowing thine enemy in the form of copies of the Herald Sun delivered free to staff rooms across Victoria every morning. I would never buy a copy but this service was useful to keep a check on the other side. My union had a wonderful bumper sticker which read 'Is that the truth or did you read it in the Herald sun? These days access to the dark side is hidden behind a firewall so I have to learn of its evil contents through headlines and the commentary of others, necessitating waaay too much decoding.
I miss the way you could relax into them, especially on the weekends. Consuming several articles on the same topic from different perspectives. Its the mono-perspective of the Murdoch rags that has made them unreadable for me. But hey, now I consume more widely via the net.
An Ipswich childhood, razor-sharp wit, rugged good looks and sound moral principles - but enough about me... Like JB I grew up in Ipswich, toddling over the road in my pjs to get the QT and the Mail and devouring the comics page. Years of enjoyment, gradually becoming frustration and disgust until I'd be happy to see them all disappear.
And it was self-inflicted really. Remember (if you lived in Qld) that the Courier Mail reported on the corruption of the Joh era and kicked off the Fitzgerald inquiry? Today it's possibly the worst of Rupert's Australian dailies, free of competition and a festering pile of lies, racism and right wing trash.
It is passing strange, that this medium which was so integrally linked with the rise of the universal suffrage in the Western empire is now there for the end of both. The 20th century certainly saw newspapers wielded by the dominant and wealthy to bring about their desired outcomes but in the later half and early 2000s the incredible concentrations in ownership saw that accelerate, Australia being a remarkable test case. I do not think I ever held newspaper to the level of esteem that some did, but I can recognise that they too have suffered from as Cory Doctorow's coined neologism 'Enshittification'.
JB, the legacy media became the enemy of you and me a long time ago. Good riddance to bad rubbish. I do remember fondly waiting in the lounge of the Regent Hotel, waiting on my room, reading the Sydney Morning Herald. If I ever visit Oz again, I’ll reserve the room starting the day _before_ I arrive.
I miss the availability of newspapers to start my fires in the cool months. Those shiny colourised flyers don't burn so well.
Oh, and regional local papers, because I live in the country and it was nice to know what the locals were up to in a way that didn't involve looking through their windows...
Was it the not-swiping-away-from, or was it that you could see the whole story spread out at once, so that you knew how much you were getting in for? Or was it the way broadsheets would collect a couple of related articles by different authors on the same double-spread?
Isn't it interesting how much that motivates us, that we cherish, are the limitations to things? Perhaps it's the sense of achievement, or perhaps it's the focus, as you say. Lots of things get a bit "meh" once you remove the limitations. Turning an LP over and lining up the needle and listening in strict sequence vs CD: press play and get the whole thing, or shuffle, vs streaming: no sense of "Album" with coherent theme at all any more...
You also got a sense of the importance placed on various items by the editors, by the size of the headline and their positioning on the page. Occasionally this turned up a gem with a small headline font from the bottom of the page. I enjoyed opinion in those times. Perhaps I was less discerning, or opinion now is much more tribal, but I no longer enjoy reading some opinionista's brittle views whose logic I can dismantle in two seconds.
I miss those thick slabs of weekend indulgence the most. I remember watching the UK papers degenerate into platforms for opinions and feeling smug about what we had in Oz. And then that model arrived here. Complete with the attached lie factory.
I buy the Weekend West because it has a good TV guide so that I can use a highlighter and record anything of interest. That gets less and less but at least I can 32 times speed through the ads with autocue for the next bit of interest.
Loved the (paper) newspaper, sitting in a cafe with a coffee, consuming a snapshot in time, watching the world go by. I also miss letters, postcards from far flung places, CDs and LPs, and carefully curated mix tapes. I miss coming to school or work and everyone discussing last night's episode.
But all things pass, and new things arise. Movies were new not so long ago. Television too. Streaming was new quite recently, and it brought us Breaking Bad, the Sopranos and Game of Thrones. New forms for human-expression will continue to emerge.
I will be absolutely delighted to NOT see the Daily Telegraph and The Australian at the supermarket checkouts! Even IGA display them so you cannot miss them. I stopped buying newspapers (I only ever bought them at weekends anyway) years ago.
Get The Age delivered on weekends. It’s in the Inbox every other day. In ancient times and a broadsheet it would cover the big table. Take days to read it. It had good writers regularly contributing. Since the 9 knuckleheads took over it’s a much poorer chronicle. They’ve let Murdoch hacks take over the opinion pieces. It’s like what’s happened to Insiders since Barrie pulled the pin. That’s the lamentable bit, paper or no paper.
I haven't bought a paper in maybe 10 years, tho I still dream about them & how important it was to get the Monday Herald so I had the tv guide for the week 🤣 mind you I still dream about smoking & that's been 18 years as well 🤷🏻♀️ I won't miss papers, but I do miss how important they were to me, especially the weekend papers - I also lost interest when the Herald went tabloid, I used to love the broadsheet
The importance is an anticipation I used to experience with weekend papers, and one I still experience online every weekend with The Saturday Paper. I can't wait to see who the Editorialist has skewered this week, who is Kudelka's victim, and what stupid things people in the pubilc eye have been saying. Oh and anything RIck Morton writes about.
Have an extra thumbs-up for mentioning newspaper editorial cartoons. Kudelka's a corker (last week's about giving the peasantry ideas was particularly good). I wonder how much of the "good structure" in the Saturday Paper derives from the fact that they do still print a paper version, I believe, and they've put some particular effort into their on-line design and layout to make sure that every page flows into other articles and contains the full masthead?
I live in a small seaside town at the bottom of Eyre Peninsula in South Australia - Tumby Bay with a population of about 2,500. I tried to get the local newsagent to get copies of the SMH but it was too expensive at $12 a copy with the freight. Then along came The Saturday Paper. After being the sole purchaser for several years I noticed that someone else had started ordering it. Tumby is surrounded by farms owned by the descendants of English and Scots migrants so I was wholly surprised to see a fellow leftie in town. A nice Indian family has now bought the local service station so things are looking up. Our newsagent is the last of the breed on the peninsula, even nearby Port Lincoln lost their newsagent a couple of years ago.
I buy the Weekend Australian as a weather gauge for my centrist views. Breaks down like this. If the day comes when I can get through the whole paper without doing any of the following I know my end is nigh. Or if it isn’t nigh it probably should be.
1. Tutting aloud about a presented viewpoint
2. Stabbing with finger at article and exclaiming to my partner “Right wing bullshit”
3. Throwing down paper staying “I can’t believe this shit”
4. Standing up, gesticulating at the sky, stating “right, enough” and going for a walk to get Vic Sunday Age for some leftist nonsense as a balance.
Somewhere I think I might still have a couple of newspapers which my mother kept from the day after some significant historical events when I was a child in the 70s. I don't know if people keep bookmarks to online coverage now, but I suspect not
Ah yes, the serendipity of finding a newspaper on the train - and leaving a newspaper for fellow commuters. I did leave a newspaper on a train recently and wondered if now this is just littering.
One thing we've lost, which rarely gets mentioned, is how physically reading a newspaper exposed you to articles on topics you might not have known about or been interested in otherwise. You want to read the article on page 13? That means glancing through 12 pages of other articles before you get there, and the one on a new form of Arctic warfare on page 10 might catch your eye and change your life’s direction or shift your opinion on something significant.
It’s similar to how Amazon has killed the joy of discovering new books on the shelves of a physical bookstore. When you only look for what you're already interested in, you miss out on the rest of the world. Physical newspapers made you look. And that’s something real we’re all going to be worse off for.
This; very much this
After 40 years at the chalkface (OK, chalkface, whiteboard and tablet, it was a long career) the thing I miss is knowing thine enemy in the form of copies of the Herald Sun delivered free to staff rooms across Victoria every morning. I would never buy a copy but this service was useful to keep a check on the other side. My union had a wonderful bumper sticker which read 'Is that the truth or did you read it in the Herald sun? These days access to the dark side is hidden behind a firewall so I have to learn of its evil contents through headlines and the commentary of others, necessitating waaay too much decoding.
I miss the way you could relax into them, especially on the weekends. Consuming several articles on the same topic from different perspectives. Its the mono-perspective of the Murdoch rags that has made them unreadable for me. But hey, now I consume more widely via the net.
Yes! That fact it took all weekend to get through the stack was a feature not a bug
An Ipswich childhood, razor-sharp wit, rugged good looks and sound moral principles - but enough about me... Like JB I grew up in Ipswich, toddling over the road in my pjs to get the QT and the Mail and devouring the comics page. Years of enjoyment, gradually becoming frustration and disgust until I'd be happy to see them all disappear.
And it was self-inflicted really. Remember (if you lived in Qld) that the Courier Mail reported on the corruption of the Joh era and kicked off the Fitzgerald inquiry? Today it's possibly the worst of Rupert's Australian dailies, free of competition and a festering pile of lies, racism and right wing trash.
It is passing strange, that this medium which was so integrally linked with the rise of the universal suffrage in the Western empire is now there for the end of both. The 20th century certainly saw newspapers wielded by the dominant and wealthy to bring about their desired outcomes but in the later half and early 2000s the incredible concentrations in ownership saw that accelerate, Australia being a remarkable test case. I do not think I ever held newspaper to the level of esteem that some did, but I can recognise that they too have suffered from as Cory Doctorow's coined neologism 'Enshittification'.
Very good point
JB, the legacy media became the enemy of you and me a long time ago. Good riddance to bad rubbish. I do remember fondly waiting in the lounge of the Regent Hotel, waiting on my room, reading the Sydney Morning Herald. If I ever visit Oz again, I’ll reserve the room starting the day _before_ I arrive.
I miss the availability of newspapers to start my fires in the cool months. Those shiny colourised flyers don't burn so well.
Oh, and regional local papers, because I live in the country and it was nice to know what the locals were up to in a way that didn't involve looking through their windows...
Was it the not-swiping-away-from, or was it that you could see the whole story spread out at once, so that you knew how much you were getting in for? Or was it the way broadsheets would collect a couple of related articles by different authors on the same double-spread?
Isn't it interesting how much that motivates us, that we cherish, are the limitations to things? Perhaps it's the sense of achievement, or perhaps it's the focus, as you say. Lots of things get a bit "meh" once you remove the limitations. Turning an LP over and lining up the needle and listening in strict sequence vs CD: press play and get the whole thing, or shuffle, vs streaming: no sense of "Album" with coherent theme at all any more...
I used to get SO ANNOYED when they’d spread a story over a couple of pages
You also got a sense of the importance placed on various items by the editors, by the size of the headline and their positioning on the page. Occasionally this turned up a gem with a small headline font from the bottom of the page. I enjoyed opinion in those times. Perhaps I was less discerning, or opinion now is much more tribal, but I no longer enjoy reading some opinionista's brittle views whose logic I can dismantle in two seconds.
I miss those thick slabs of weekend indulgence the most. I remember watching the UK papers degenerate into platforms for opinions and feeling smug about what we had in Oz. And then that model arrived here. Complete with the attached lie factory.
I buy the Weekend West because it has a good TV guide so that I can use a highlighter and record anything of interest. That gets less and less but at least I can 32 times speed through the ads with autocue for the next bit of interest.
Loved the (paper) newspaper, sitting in a cafe with a coffee, consuming a snapshot in time, watching the world go by. I also miss letters, postcards from far flung places, CDs and LPs, and carefully curated mix tapes. I miss coming to school or work and everyone discussing last night's episode.
But all things pass, and new things arise. Movies were new not so long ago. Television too. Streaming was new quite recently, and it brought us Breaking Bad, the Sopranos and Game of Thrones. New forms for human-expression will continue to emerge.
I will be absolutely delighted to NOT see the Daily Telegraph and The Australian at the supermarket checkouts! Even IGA display them so you cannot miss them. I stopped buying newspapers (I only ever bought them at weekends anyway) years ago.
No I will not miss them ONE BIT🤗
Get The Age delivered on weekends. It’s in the Inbox every other day. In ancient times and a broadsheet it would cover the big table. Take days to read it. It had good writers regularly contributing. Since the 9 knuckleheads took over it’s a much poorer chronicle. They’ve let Murdoch hacks take over the opinion pieces. It’s like what’s happened to Insiders since Barrie pulled the pin. That’s the lamentable bit, paper or no paper.
I haven't bought a paper in maybe 10 years, tho I still dream about them & how important it was to get the Monday Herald so I had the tv guide for the week 🤣 mind you I still dream about smoking & that's been 18 years as well 🤷🏻♀️ I won't miss papers, but I do miss how important they were to me, especially the weekend papers - I also lost interest when the Herald went tabloid, I used to love the broadsheet
The importance is an anticipation I used to experience with weekend papers, and one I still experience online every weekend with The Saturday Paper. I can't wait to see who the Editorialist has skewered this week, who is Kudelka's victim, and what stupid things people in the pubilc eye have been saying. Oh and anything RIck Morton writes about.
Have an extra thumbs-up for mentioning newspaper editorial cartoons. Kudelka's a corker (last week's about giving the peasantry ideas was particularly good). I wonder how much of the "good structure" in the Saturday Paper derives from the fact that they do still print a paper version, I believe, and they've put some particular effort into their on-line design and layout to make sure that every page flows into other articles and contains the full masthead?
I live in a small seaside town at the bottom of Eyre Peninsula in South Australia - Tumby Bay with a population of about 2,500. I tried to get the local newsagent to get copies of the SMH but it was too expensive at $12 a copy with the freight. Then along came The Saturday Paper. After being the sole purchaser for several years I noticed that someone else had started ordering it. Tumby is surrounded by farms owned by the descendants of English and Scots migrants so I was wholly surprised to see a fellow leftie in town. A nice Indian family has now bought the local service station so things are looking up. Our newsagent is the last of the breed on the peninsula, even nearby Port Lincoln lost their newsagent a couple of years ago.
Oh yeah First Dog in the Moon in The Guardian - excellent point
I buy the Weekend Australian as a weather gauge for my centrist views. Breaks down like this. If the day comes when I can get through the whole paper without doing any of the following I know my end is nigh. Or if it isn’t nigh it probably should be.
1. Tutting aloud about a presented viewpoint
2. Stabbing with finger at article and exclaiming to my partner “Right wing bullshit”
3. Throwing down paper staying “I can’t believe this shit”
4. Standing up, gesticulating at the sky, stating “right, enough” and going for a walk to get Vic Sunday Age for some leftist nonsense as a balance.
Somewhere I think I might still have a couple of newspapers which my mother kept from the day after some significant historical events when I was a child in the 70s. I don't know if people keep bookmarks to online coverage now, but I suspect not
Ah yes, the serendipity of finding a newspaper on the train - and leaving a newspaper for fellow commuters. I did leave a newspaper on a train recently and wondered if now this is just littering.