The Atlanta Journal Constitution's announcement that it was eliminating its print edition got me thinking about physical newspapers. In high school I worked at Newsstand #1, one of a chain of newspaper and magazine stores in New Haven, Connecticut. For decades, my Sunday mornings were spent at a diner with greasy eggs, mediocre coffee, and the New York Times (or Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Atlanta Journal Constitution, or whatever the major daily was in the city in which I lived at the time). That said, I can't remember the last time I paid for a print newspaper. It's been at least 15 years since I had a paper delivered to my house.
Fewer and fewer people get newspapers delivered at home or the office. Newspaper boxes, once ubiquitous, have all but vanished. Most of us mostly get our news online - for me it's from daily emails from the New York Times, Politico, Punchbowl, Axios, Inside Higher Ed, and the Free Press. Not all my news is virtual. At home I get a few magazines, mostly for the tactile joy and for a break from a screen. But my daily news intake is focused on politics and higher education (with smatterings of soccer gossip), and it’s entirely digital. The only paper I regularly read on actual paper is The Hatchet.
I miss the feel and sound of a physical newspaper (not enough to buy a paper copy, but there's a nostalgic pull). What I miss more, and what I've been working on finding elsewhere, is the news I wasn't looking for. A newspaper has stories next to each other based on what the editor thinks is important or interesting. There's nothing algorithmic about it. That means that readers see things they would otherwise miss - conflicts in countries that aren't often on the national agenda, new finds of old civilizations, or profiles of people the reader might never have heard of. Algorithms narrow our worlds, editors expand them.
I've recently been searching for random things online and clicking on random links to get my algorithm to feed me the unexpected. I'll pull up sites students mention in class, watch videos from obscure bands from the 80s or 90s (Material Issue, Pere Ubu), search for British sportscars for sale online, all in the hopes of nudging the digital math in unpredictable directions.
Our lives are busy, people in SMPA tend to be focused. It is easy to forget to look for the unexpected. In the frenzy of our daily lives, it's important to remember to look for what we otherwise might not see.