Tom Swift Writer’s Notebook

The ritual was almost nightly. After my stories were filed I would go to the all-night Jack in the Box and by the time I had finished dirty bombing my gut with Sourdough Jacks and extra fries the late-night editors would have put the newspaper to bed. I’d return to the then empty newsroom, flip on a computer, slip on my headphones (so as to not hear the overnight cleaning crew doing what cleaning crews do) and read all of my favorite columnists from all over the country. Ten years later I still read online. Cheap as I am, I love that I can browse papers and mags for free. And, of course, today there’s so much more content to choose from.

But, man, I’m getting tired of staring at a screen.

I spend no small number of hours pecking at the laptop and I’m as likely to abandon online as I am to start chiseling my writing into granite tablets. If I am reading a blog post or a short news item the machine does it best. But that’s the problem. If I’m reading anything longer than that my short attention span becomes even more abbreviated. I look for reasons to stop reading.

When I come across longer articles I’ll print them out, find them at the library or skip them altogether. But I hate wasting ink, I can’t get to the library every day, and often the most salient writing cannot be confined to a few hundred words.

So as the world continues to go plastic lately I have started asking for paper. I find myself making a weekly 20-minute drive to pick up a good newspaper (home delivery of said paper not an option at the moment). For the first time in years, a few weeks ago I subscribed to a magazine. And I’m holding onto one of those postcards that fall out of every fourth page because I just might take another.

After years reading periodicals online, I see what I’ve been missing — and I’m sure this point will be obvious — exposure to a breadth and depth of information I don’t get any other way. It’s not that I don’t hear about news events online. Quite the contrary. But online I am either not provided, or I do not seek, more than a blurb’s worth. Perhaps more importantly, when I open a newspaper or a magazine I discover and read articles that would have sailed by me in cyberspace.

Going offline has it’s own quandary because there are so few good newspapers anymore. With rare exception, small ones don’t care enough about reporting to retain quality employees and the big ones keep trying to be what they can never be — print versions of blogs. Google “newspaper” and “layoff” and you’ll find some chilling statistics. Thousands of good reporters are losing their jobs daily as newspapers keep shrinking their news holes. The paradox: there’s never been a longer menu of news and yet I feel the least satisfied with my choices.

I recently asked a friend (and if you have a good answer to this question I’d love to hear it) what he reads that he trusts to provide comprehensive quality journalism. There’s far more to life than news — heck, there’s far more to reading than news — but I’d like to know what’s going on in the world. And if I am forced to feed on mass amounts of the informational equivalent of Sourdough Jacks what will I miss and how will it (how does it) alter the world when most other people miss it, too?

Now I better cease this rant, lest it become too long for even me to read.

This post was added on Sunday, July 13, 2008 by Tom Swift at 17:39 and is filed under Rough Drafts, Soapbox.