I just read that “Our Sunday Visitor” a storied Catholic newspaper will no longer print hard copy papers. Let me backtrack. In fact, their newspaper ceased publication in 2024 and was replaced by a magazine. The magazine is now going out of production with its October publication.
Thus, there will be no hard copy publications from OSV, only on-line news.
And that’s what is killing the hard copy newspapers. The digital age, the internet and most humble blogs like mine.
I use to love to hold a newspaper in my hand and read it while I ate breakfast. But reading “papers” on line is the new way to deliver papers. Not the hardcopy but the digital form.
As a child, I delivered hardcopy newspapers for “The Augusta Herald”. It was owned by “The Augusta Chronicle.” The Chronicle was the morning paper and the Herald was the afternoon paper and every afternoon I delivered papers. I was in elementary school. And at the age of 10 or so, I went to people’s homes, knocked on the door, entered their house and gave them a pitch about why they should buy a subscription to “The Augusta Herald”. Sometimes they would offer me a drink of some kind, not mixed though. Elementary school age!
The Herald closed in the mid 1990’s and only the morning paper remains but now a mere shadow of its former self and owned now, not by a local southerner, but a liberal Yankee conglomerate which also prints USAtoday!
I grieve the era of hardcopy newspapers, both secular and religious, will soon be gone with the wind. There’s no going backwards to the good old days in this regard. The piecemeal digital way people get their news is here to stay or is it?
5 comments:
I too used to look forward to reading a print newspaper. Sunday mornings, after mass of course, were for pouring through that day's addition with all its extras, color comics while watching the political talking heads. I swear my late father used to savor every word.
Digital did kill the print newspaper. I have helped and continue helping it along. Ad revenue doesn't go as far leading to reductions in the more interesting content about local goings on, sports, food, travel, you name it. Papers have shrunk in size and content. It's a shame. In so many ways, devices, particularly phones, have changed society, socialization, the exchange of ideas, living in the moment and so forth. I'm not so sure we're ultimately better off for it.
According to Gates, Zuckerberg, and high tech gurus, the smart phone is on its way out too, and everything will be displayed via a chip attached to the brain and you will get all messages and news on a virtual display such as glasses or such. No more carrying of anything. How about that!
I delivered the Asbury Park Press every day and the Newark Sunday News on Sunday. On rainy Sundays my dad would drive me before Mass, otherwise I rode my bike loaded with papers. What a great job in many ways.
I am sure it will come to pass, hopefully after I either become senile or have died. There is a good in growing old, but they might keep me alive with artificial intelligence implanted throughout my body! Ugh! 😩
My older brother had the paper route and I helped him when I was in the 4th and 5th grade. We rode out bikes too and Augusta has hills!!!! We got home from school, the papers were already delivered, we had to fold them and if the weather was bad, we had to put the paper into a waxed bag too. That was Monday through Saturday in the afternoon. Then on Sunday, there was only the morning paper delivered to us by 1 am and my father got us up to fold the papers but he would drive us on Sunday and when it was raining on other days. I hated as a 4th grader getting up at 1 am but we were finished delivering papers by 5 AM and then went to Mass at 8 AM!
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