In Praise of the Sunday Paper

I've had quite enough of Twitter, thank you. I'm also over MySpace and growing tired of Facebook, with all the fragmentary discourse on things I couldn't care less about. (Such as, apparently, the "grammar myth" about the undesirability of ending a sentence with a preposition.)

On Sunday mornings, I want spread my newspaper across the kitchen table. Preferably, a great, big fat edition with lots of in-depth, locally-written articles/series. I want a nice book section, color funny pages, grocery-store and car ads, an occasional slow-cooker recipe, crossword puzzles, and Dear Abby.

I want my week to start on simmer, not a boil (or ten million wisps of steam) and I want to enjoy it at the breakfast table with my tea or coffee and my breakfast. I want to quietly recharge my batteries without the noise or clicking or the backlit screen that makes my eyes sting.

I want that sense of continuity that connects me with my parents', grandparents', and great grandparents' generations. I want to imagine the journalists out interviewing folks with stubby pencils or working in a Lou Grant-style newsroom. (My imagination's shamelessly old school in this area, though I'm well aware the world has changed.)

And I want this tradition to continue, which is why I won't consider letting my newspaper subscription lapse. It's cheap, for one thing, considering what it offers. If I want to economize (always), there are plenty of other "frills" I can cut instead.

If we want great newspapers to happen, we need to vote for our wallets by supporting those that offer depth beyond the wire service stories we can all see online and original reporting. Otherwise, you lose the privilege of wringing your hands and lamenting when your city loses its last print paper.

And the rest of us lose something well worth saving.