From the Library: Global distress

Front-page news this week once again warns us that the Boston Globe is threatening to cease publication. Soon. And at best it might morph into something totally digital; at worse it will vanish from our lives entirely.

A 24/7WallSt.com column on Time.com on March 9 said that 10 of our nation’s favorite dailies, the Boston Globe among them, were in trouble. “Rubbish!,” we thought. That’s news of a death “greatly exaggerated.”

How could Boston, the birthplace of our very own news-messenger Paul Revere and newspaper editor Ben Franklin, for goodness sake, lose its renowned newspaper? After all, we aren’t a cowboy town like Denver, which recently lost its Rocky Mountain News. We aren’t coffee-drunk Seattle, which lost the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

I mean, did you know that Las Vegas has one of the lowest newspaper readerships in the country? That’s 3,000 miles from here and certainly is not Boston. Yet, the warnings coming again this week are hard to dismiss.

I take this news especially tough because I’ve finally re-bonded with a big city newspaper in the past few years. Years ago I began moving around the country, out of the country, to the “country” (New Hampshire), and I finally landed back in the Boston area in 2005.

My wanderings having ceased, my children having grown, the Sunday Globe is more than just an informing, leisurely weekend read; it is a sign of my permanence in the area. It’s a time I relish – those easy, thoughtful morning hours I spend decorating the carpet with newsprint and ads. I have lovingly made reading the Globe’s Ideas section and the Globe Magazine my ritual on the weekends.

Pages are read, articles are circled, and entire sections are tucked inside my briefcase every Sunday night on their way to my office the next morning. It is there that book reviews become book orders, brainy tidbits become blog entries, and articles of interest get tucked away for future use.  

I wasn’t surprised but saddened, however, to open my paper last month to read that we might quickly and suddenly lose the Globe. Newspaper readership everywhere has been declining for a decade or more. Oh, certainly when the news hit there was a loud outcry in the form of letters to the editor, blog entries, and Internet articles in “Global distress.” Readers like me begged the New York Times and the Globe to come to their senses, please. Writers purported that democracy and newspapers coexist in harmony, without them elections and interest in local government go by the wayside.

There is, indeed, a theory that readers only read what they want to read on the Internet. They do not seek out the same divergence of opinion available on the printed page.

Not surprisingly, I cheerlessly add, not everyone is saddened. A Web site entirely devoted to watching the decline of the newspaper, www.newspaperdeathwatch.com, is excited and hoping for the “rebirth of journalism” on the Internet. Some Bostonians, mercy me, have never respected the Globe’s liberal bent and are gleefully waiting for its demise.

It seems that it is hard for some to reconcile the bulky and awkward print newspaper with the ease of television news and comprehensive coverage on the Internet. Many of the younger generation are just not bonding with the print version. Even my adult daughters may not have that snappy answer to “What’s black and white and read all over?” (From the Pew Research Center comes the statistic that “Only 26 percent of 18 to 24 year-olds report reading the paper yesterday” and they spent only nine minutes doing so. They also spent little time listening to radio news or watching television news but 46 percent had read a magazine.)

The Morrill Memorial Library subscribes to many daily and weekly newspapers and I, for one, will be saddened if any one of them disappears from the library, let alone the newsstands and family rooms. It certainly won’t be due to lack of library funding but instead to the lack of interest from our communities.

The library’s comfortable and cool Cushing Reading Room is often filled to capacity with library users who prefer to save a tree, save a penny, or commune with others in a comfortable spot reading the newspapers that we make available for our patrons. It’s often not the headline news we look for in our newspapers – local community papers and big-city ones. It’s the local color, the familiar columnists, the simple act of reading in a way that just feels like home.

Charlotte Canelli is library director of the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood.