You Can Pry My New York Times From My Cold, Dead Hands

But I Wish You'd Stop Trying So Hard

For the first time in my life, I am living in a place where there is no home newspaper delivery, even though it’s a part of New York (the Hudson Valley) that the Times seems to discover every six months for its cultural, culinary or real estate value.

So, while I also pay for the convenience of a digital subscription, I drive ten miles every morning to the nearest gas station to buy a hard copy.  My day is not complete if I don’t have the opportunity to sit down with the physical paper and turn every page.

I’ve been doing that since high school, and I honestly couldn’t name a more important influence on my interests and world view. I love the serendipity of discovering something new and interesting I wouldn’t find scrolling down a phone screen. 

But the other morning I was informed by the crew that works behind the counter mostly making coffee and hearty lunches for truckers, that as of Monday, they will no longer be carrying newspapers.

“We make 9 cents” said Sparky, (his real name) who also mans the transfer station on Wednesdays and Saturdays.  “But we have to pay a separate delivery fee for each of those papers—the Times, the Albany paper, the Berkshire Eagle.” (See what I did there?)

“I object,” I cried, and am crying now. It may not be on the same order of urgency as lowering the cost of prescription drugs, but doing something about onerous newspaper delivery fees would get my vote.

That truck stop replaced a closer gas station that carried newspapers and made lunches until the owner died, and she had replaced a charming country store that also made sandwiches to which they taped Tootsie Pops for kids to take to the lake. 

I still have a few options to get my daily fix of the print edition of the New York Times, but that means I’m only seeing more ripples in my personal space-time continuum. I live in a New York Times warp, and I don’t like it much.

Because I like to read the day’s news in the day’s paper, I’ll catch a glimpse on the Times’ website of a big story about an important Senate race, or some lengthy investigative reporting, and look forward to reading it the next morning.

But not so fast!  It can be days, weeks, or even months before a digital version of some Times stories appears in print.  I look at the website frequently during a typical day, but if I can reasonably guess that an important story will be in the next day’s paper, I’ll wait.

A friend used to praise the Times’ reporting on what she called “Page 3 countries,” quirky stories about second or third tier nations that never made it to the front pages, usually accompanied by a helpful little map.

Now, Page 3 of the print edition cross-promotes content the Times publishes online, even typesetting lengthy url addresses into news columns for those rare occasions when you want to put down your newspaper, get your laptop and fire up a browser.

And I haven’t seen those little maps in a long time. 

I wonder sometimes if the Times regards print readers like me the way Steve Jobs regarded buyers of the Apple TV device.  He called them “hobbyists.” 

Of course, I understand that as advertisers abandoned newspapers, the 24-page sections of decades past are now six or eight.   The Saturday Arts section now includes travel tips and recipes, and the Sunday paper can barely last an entire brunch.

The usability expert

Jakob Nielsen on UX

believes humans are always foraging for information—that we’re “informavores” who hunt for facts online.  We jump into a site, sniff around for an “information scent” and quickly leave for someplace else if we don’t immediately get a buzz.

Nielsen says that we read screens at a rate that’s 25 percent slower than reading on paper, and with far more impatience over what we’re willing to take in.  Eye tracking research shows that online readers tend to skip large blocks of text.  In his paper “Long vs. Short articles as Content Strategy,” Nielson wrote, “people prefer to read short articles…People tend to be ruthless in abandoning long-winded sites; they mainly want to skim highlights.”

And of course, when news itself is devalued, the motivation to pay for it also goes down.  Tim Groot Kormelink, a professor at Department of Language, Literature & Communication at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam did a qualitative study of why people don’t pay for news and found four key reasons: “price, sufficient freely available news, not wanting to commit oneself, and delivery and technical issues.”

“A key finding,” he wrote, “is that digital entertainment subscriptions like Netflix and Spotify seemed central to how younger participants thought about paying for news.

Add to that equation what a researcher in the U.K. found about the time most people spend at online news sites, compared to the dead tree editions.   Neil Thurman, professor of communication at LMU Munich, concluded the average online visitor to a national newspaper website spends less than 30 seconds per day there, while print readers average 40 minutes.

I wish that every school and workplace would set aside twenty minutes every day for everyone to read a newspaper.  I’m willing to concede that it doesn’t have to be the New York Times, or even a print edition.  And I’m sure that no matter what your job is, you’ll do it better if you read a good newspaper.

I’ll hold on to my print newspaper as long as they’ll let me, and so should you. Ask for one at your local store—you might like it.

And like Arlo Guthrie said about a bunch of people going into draft boards and singing a few lines of “Alice’s Restaurant,” if enough people do it, “friends, they may think it's a movement.”