Almost Dark: Not Quite Yet

This month’s Harpers has an article by Richard Rodriguez called ‘Twilight of the American Newspaper.’  I’ve followed Rodriguez’s literary and TV career over the years and have always found him the most interesting and most eloquent of despairers.  I mentioned to Ed this morning that there was a Rodriguez article in Harpers, and his reply was, ‘What is he sad about?’  Which may about cover it.  He used to (and may still for all I know) convey his hopelessness as an occasional contributor to the PBS evening TV news, and I always felt the better for knowing that someone shared my feeling that things were indeed going to hell in a handcart, as my grandmother always said.

But, that sense of doom needs to be taken in small measures.  And one article every year or so in the morning with coffee is about my allotment.  His point was that newspapers are not disappearing because the internet has overtaken them, or at least not just because the internet has overtaken them.  His claim is that newspapers in the U.S., anyway, arose in order to tell us who and where we were in this new land.  Thus, using San Francisco as his examplar, the first newspapers in S.F. followed close upon the gold rush and the great intake of people who had no sense of community in a town which hardly existed anyway until they all got there. 

The San Francisco Chronicle (in its first form) told the first-comers what was happening, and then told the second-comers the nature of the place in which they were now living.  Rodriguez’s account seemed right on to me.  I grew up in a small town in the West, and it, too, had a daily paper.  If you wanted to know what was happening far away, in Europe or Utah, you read the Salt Lake City Tribune, but if you wanted to know what was happening in Pocatello, you read the Pocatello Tribune, even if you were just a 12-year-old.  Who was born, who died, who did well in school, what the high school basketball team was doing, what jobs were around, what houses were for sale or rent, what church was conducting what community event, what the City Council and the civic organizations were up to.  Boys scouts, girl scouts, cub scouts, brownies, campfire girls, bluebirds, 4-H: every kid in town, at one time or another, had his picture in the local paper.  That’s how we knew who we were and where we lived.  That was the town, and just as much so as its physical existence.

Rodriguez went on to say that we don’t live in those kinds of towns anymore.  The physical places are still there, but our newspaper existence has pretty much disappeared.  And that may be true.  When my son and his family lived in a small town in Minnesota, the local paper was largely classified ads and syndicated stuff from wire services.  Maybe it’s different in other small towns, but all small towns with newspapers are having difficulty staying alive, and their preferred business plan is probably not more coverage of girl scout meetings. 

So I would join Mr.Rodriguez in his despair, if it were not that I lived in Point Roberts where, even though it is only a once-a-month publication, the All Point Bulletin is totally devoted to tracking and demonstrating our existence.  We are here because the APB says we are, and we are what we seem to be because the APB keeps reminding us of it!  So, down with doom, and up with Pat, Louise, and Meg: our authenticators and chief reminders of what a motley, crotchety, generous, and interesting lot we are.