I removed the two old and battered daily newspaper tubes at the end of the lane this week and, with that simple act, ended one of the longest traditions of my life.

There’s been a printed daily newspaper in my home, wherever that’s been, since I was a small child. I was looking at the Sunday comics in the Virginian-Pilot before I was able to read them.

In recent years, though, things have changed too much for even this old lover of printers’ ink, though I’ve been slow to admit it.

For years, we had both the Daily Press and Virginian-Pilot Sunday editions delivered to the house as well as the DPs on weekdays. The Richmond Times Dispatch came to the office, as did another copy of the Pilot.

After we retired, and after the Pilot and Daily Press were merged by their current owner, it didn’t make any sense to keep subscribing to both, so we opted to keep the Pilot and drop the DP. 

I took the online subscription as well, and a couple of years ago, as subscription prices climbed, we dropped the daily print edition, keeping the scaled-down offer of Wednesdays and Sundays. 

But recently, the price of even that kept growing, so we dropped the print editions completely. Two weeks ago marked the first time I didn’t have a Sunday paper to sit down and read — ever — and I haven’t yet fully recovered from the transition. 

That’s not to say I don’t read newspapers. By dropping the Pilot’s print edition, I’m more comfortable financially subscribing to the four dailies I read online — the Pilot, Richmond Times Dispatch, Washington Post and New York Times. 

Add The Smithfield Times, which we receive — and always will — by mail as well as online, and that makes five. (By the way, The Smithfield Times remains the best deal among all the options.)

So, I have all the news one can possibly find the time to absorb, and am able to try and track what’s happening in Hampton Roads, Virginia, the nation and the world. Depressing though most of it is, it’s important to stay reasonably informed, and in the news columns of papers, digital or print, can be found what’s really happening rather than what’s being spun to reinforce the beliefs of liberals or conservatives, depending on their preferred poison.

The reasons for the decline in printed newspapers during the past several decades are more complicated than they might seem at first glance. The internet bears a great deal of responsibility, having increased dramatically the options for businesses to advertise, and having sucked a huge amount of that ad revenue away from papers as a result. 

However, revenue is only part of the story. There’s also a mistaken belief that the internet is an easy way to stay informed. It can be, but only if it’s used carefully, which it too often is not. 

There are actually very few sources easier to use than daily newspapers. They are generally well-organized, orderly and can be read in-depth or scanned quickly. Historically, if you worked your way through a good metro daily, you were reasonably sure you had a pretty good feel for the important news of that day. 

You can get the same news from an online version of the newspaper, but you need to subscribe — pay for it — to get the full range of news. The websites of most papers just don’t offer the full array of their news coverage.

An awful lot of people, though, feel that a quick glance at a website or even a stroll with their browser will give them what they are seeking, but what they’re seeking is often a viewpoint, not the news, and that has more to do with the divisions in our country than with the scaled-down versions of today’s daily papers, but the former has certainly contributed to the latter.

And then, there’s the whole business of reading habits, regardless of politics. People don’t want to read in-depth stories. They want nuggets of news, or any other information, for that matter. 

We’re all guilty of this very bad habit to some degree, and it takes discipline to force ourselves to go much beyond the headlines. Our desire to reinforce our viewpoint also feeds our drive to read less and less. If we take the time to read long, detailed, and often nuanced, stories that really dig deeply into a subject, we might find ourselves questioning one of our fondest-held beliefs, and that would never do.

None of this rambling makes me feel better about walking away from in-print daily news, for I know that Sunday is coming, and with it another morning when, if I want to read Beetle Bailey or Blondie, I’ll have to do it online. And that will just never be the same.

I suppose the saving grace is that I won’t be getting ink smudges on Sunday’s white shirts anymore.

 

John Edwards is publisher emeritus of The Smithfield Times. His email address is j.branchedwards@gmail.com.