The sun would rise over the Rockies and Robin Gammons would run to the front porch to get the morning paper before school.
She wanted comics and her father wanted sports, but the Montana Standard meant more than their daily race to get Calvin and Hobbes or baseball scores. When one of the three children made the honor roll, won a basketball game or dressed a freshly killed bison for the History Club, appearing in the pages of the Standard made the accomplishments feel more real. Robin became an artist with a one-woman show at a downtown gallery, and the front-page article was also on the fridge. Five years later, the yellowed article is still there.
The Montana Standard cut its print circulation to three days a week two years ago, cutting printing expenses the same way 1,200 U.S. newspapers have over the past two decades. About 3,500 jobs were closed at the same time. An average of two a week have closed this year.
It turns out that slow fade means more than changing news habits. It speaks directly to the presence of the newspaper in our lives – not just in terms of the information printed on it, but also its identity as a physical object with many other uses.
“You can pass it on. You can keep it. And then, of course, it’s all the fun stuff,” says Diane DeBlois, one of the founders of the Ephemera Society of America, a group of scholars, researchers, dealers and collectors who focus on what they call “precious primary source information.”
“Newspapers packed fish. They washed windows. They appeared in outbuildings,” she says. “And…free toilet paper.”
The downward spiral of the media business has changed American democracy over the past two decades—some believe for the better, many for the worse. What is indisputable: The gradual decline of printed paper—the item that so many millions read for information and then reused in household workflows—quietly altered the texture of everyday life.
American Democracy and Pet Cages
People used to catch up with the world, then save their precious memories, protect their floors and furniture, wrap presents, line pet cages and light fires. In Butte, in San Antonio, Texas, in much of New Jersey, and around the world, lives without printed paper are just a little different.
For newspaper publishers, the cost of printing is too high in an industry that is under pressure in an online society. For ordinary people, physical paper joins the payphone, the cassette, the answering machine, the bank check, the sound of the internal combustion engine, and the pair of ivory-white ladies’ gloves as objects whose disappearance marks the passage of time.
“Very hard to see while it’s happening, much easier to see things like this even in modest hindsight,” says Marilyn Nissenson, co-author of Going Going Gone: Vanishing Americana. “Young women were going to work and they wore them for a while and then one day they looked at them and thought, ‘This is ridiculous.’ It was a small but telling icon for a much larger social change.”
Nick Mathews thinks a lot about newspapers. Both parents worked at the Pekin (Illinois) Daily Times. He went on to become sports editor of the Houston Chronicle and now an assistant professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism.
“I have fond memories of my parents using newspapers to wrap presents,” he says. “In my family, you always knew the gift was from my parents by the case it was wrapped in.”
In Houston, he recalled recently, the Chronicle sold out reliably when the Astros, Rockets or Texas won a championship because so many people wanted the paper as a souvenir.
Four years ago, Mathews interviewed 19 people in Caroline County, Va., about the 2018 closing of the Caroline Progress, a 99-year-old weekly newspaper that closed months before its 100th birthday.
In “Print Imprint: The Connection Between the Physical Newspaper and the Self,” published in the Journal of Communication Inquiry, wistful Virginians recall their high school portrait and the picture of their daughter in a wedding dress that appears in Progress. Additionally, one told Mathews, “My fingers are too clean now. I feel sad without ink stains.”
Many and varied uses
Funded by Omahans who invested years ago with local boy Warren Buffett, Nebraska Wildlife Rehab is a well-equipped facility for migratory waterfowl, wading birds, reptiles, foxes, coyotes, coyotes, mink and beaver.
“We take in over 8,000 animals each year, and we use that newspaper for almost all of those animals,” says executive director Laura Stastny.
Getting old newspapers has never been a problem in this Midwestern neighborhood town. Still, Stastny worries about the electronic future.
“We’re doing pretty well now,” she says. “If we lost that source and had to use something else or had to purchase something, that, with the available options we have now, would easily cost us more than $10,000 a year.”
That would be almost 1 percent of the budget, Stastny says, but “I’ve never been in a position to be without them, so I might be shocked at a higher dollar figure.”
By 1974, the Omaha World-Herald printed one morning and two afternoon editions, including a late afternoon Wall Street edition with closing prices.
“Afternoon major league baseball was still standard then, so I got to enjoy both baseball and the stock market facts,” Buffett, 85, told the World-Herald in 2013. By then, he had become the world’s most famous investor and the newspaper’s owner.
The World-Herald ended its second afternoon edition in 2016, and Buffett left the newspaper business five years ago. Fewer than 60,000 households pick up the paper today, according to Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, down from nearly 190,000 in 2005, or about one per household.
Time moves forward
Few places symbolize the shift from print to digital more than Akalla, a neighborhood in Stockholm where the ST01 data center sits on a site once occupied by the factory that printed Sweden’s main newspaper, says Kaun.
“They have fewer and fewer machines, and instead the building is taken over more and more by this co-located data center,” she says.
Data centers use huge amounts of energy, of course, and the environmental benefit of using less printing paper is also offset by the enormous popularity of online shopping.
“You will see a decrease in printed paper, but there is a huge increase in packaging,” says Cecilia Alcoreza, manager, Forest Sector Transformation for the World Wildlife Fund.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution announced in August that it would stop providing a print edition at the end of the year and go fully digital, making Atlanta the largest U.S. metropolitan area without a print newspaper.
The habit of following the news – of being informed about the world – cannot be divorced from the existence of print, says Anne Kaun, professor of media and communication studies at Södertörn University in Stockholm.
Children who grew up in homes with print newspapers and magazines encountered news at random and were socialized into a news-reading habit, Kaun observed. With cell phones, that doesn’t happen.
“I think it significantly changes the way we relate to each other, the way we relate to things like news. It reshapes attention and communication,” says Sarah Wasserman, a cultural critic and assistant dean at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire who specializes in changing forms of communication.
“These things will always continue to exist in certain spheres and certain pockets and certain class niches,” she says. “But I think it’s fading.”