Goodbye to Romance

An inevitable occurrence took place this past Saturday in Madison, WI, one of my favorite cities. The Capital Times stopped publishing a print edition and became solely Web based. It was inevitable if for no other reason than the fact that the Times was an afternoon newspaper. Afternoon newspaper? I thought you died a long, long time ago. Readership for the Times declined quite a bit over the years and existence was no longer profitable, much less relevant.

I have the feeling that all physical newspapers may one day go the way of the dodo and exist only in cyberspace. The immediacy of the Internet is a wonderful thing, unimaginable to someone like me only twenty years ago, but it's this immediacy that is killing off a product, the printed newspaper, that is tortoise-like by comparison to anything on the Net. Not only that, but newsprint costs money, hence the ever shrinking daily paper. And quite frankly, from an environmental standpoint, must trees die so that I can the box score of last nights White Sox game. Well, ok, I must admit that generally doesn't bother me in the least, but it seems like a good point to bring up.

I'll miss newspapers, and to a certain extent, I miss them now. When I was a child, and a geeky nerd child I was, I used to love to occasionally read an out of town newspaper. Usually, these could be acquired only on a visit to downtown Chicago, where newspaper stands still existed; the current King Richard II abolished them in the early years of his reign, deeming them unsightly. I loved to look at them on the racks of these shacks on busy corners of the Loop, papers from cities near and far, New York, Los Angeles, Cleveland. Yes, Cleveland, what of it? Decaying rust belt burgs had an odd appeal to me and my depressed pre-teenage gloominess; Cleveland seemed like a physical manifestation of my emotions, a place that I thought of as perpetually cloudy and smog filled. Of course, the New York Times was a special treat. It was from New York, the capital of the world, a city every Chicagoan hated even if we hadn't ever been there, but it was part of our consciousness, a place we saw on TV and in the movies every day, a mythical place, sort of a violent Camelot with a bad attitude.

I don't read newspapers from far away anymore, unless I'm in that far away place in person. No, those days are over now, over a long time ago. Now? I can, and do, get the New York Times every day online. Which is great, but it's different. Not as romantic. I can get any newspaper from anywhere online now. Which is great, this large world getting smaller and closer, but it's different. Not as romantic. And it's not easy to share the funny papers when they're on a computer. So that's it, right there. Not as easy to share. It's easy to point something out to your spouse, or whoever might be sitting next to you at home or on a train, but you may be less inclined to hold out your palm sized computer and say, hey, take a look at this. One is more inclined to stay in one's cocoon when one is on a computer. Thus will our social skills become ever more dissipated. And mine were never good to begin with.