As we age and times change, we lose our past. Many of the residents of Trinity View have left behind a valued tradition of their younger years, a daily newspaper. Big city or small town, that’s how we got the news.
In our library and coffee room, we have three papers, the Wall Street Journal for those who still have some money left, and two local papers owned and structured by Gannett, a major multi-paper publisher in the business for the money, apparently not to emphasize local news.
We grew up in an era when everyone subscribed to and read a daily newspaper. Before I was nine years old, I lived in a small Michigan town that had the least circulation newspaper in the state, the South Haven Tribune, and my mother was a stringer for the Chicago Tribune, for the big city 75 miles away.
So we received the two daily Tribunes on our front porch. I devoured the news.
While a little league baseball player, I followed the budding career of Jackie Robinson in both papers. When McArthur was relieved by Truman, I cut out the full-page picture that the big paper ran when the General returned for accolades in Chicago. I hung it in my room.
When Northwest Flight 2501 went down just outside the Lake Michigan beach of our little town, at that time the most significant domestic air disaster in the United States, I carefully perused every detail as body parts were counted floating ashore.
Then we moved to Asheville where we subscribed to the morning Citizen and the afternoon Times. And at 11 years old, I was delivering the afternoon paper on a bicycle but only after I had read the Times right off the truck.
As a birthday gift, I got a tiny printing device with rubber letters to be mounted on a rotary drum, and I started my own one-page newspaper, 8” by 5”, two columns. I was going to be a journalist.
I wrote for two different high school and three college newspapers, reading a lot of newspapers along the way, even did a Sunday church bulletin in newspaper columns. I regretted in some ways that I found municipal finance more in keeping with my skills. But I knew I would get back to it somehow.
When I retired and came back to Asheville, there was an alternative newspaper, Mountain Xpress, willing to take on an aging writer with no experience. I’m glad I tried it. However, apparently too old to sit in public meetings all day and chase down local government officials, I soon retired again. But I was a journalist paid the equivalent of $13.25 an hour in today’s economy and just made it under the wire, a dying breed.
Sadly, print media is disappearing.
From 2008 to 2019, the decline in journalists was more than 50%. Those who remain are paid very little. The average wage for reporters in Asheville is $13.65, not the cub reporter, but the average. Email and TV spread the news and very poorly if you want to know.
So I briefly review those papers left, watch too much cable TV, and check Facebook regularly falling right in line with the all those who have abandoned newspapers. We can frequently find the titles of our childhood papers still publishing, but the news is hard to find.
