J. TODD FOSTER: When Newspapers Die, So Does An American Linchpin

The year will be 2039 and my 10-year-old grandson will climb onto the porch swing and sit next to me. He’ll be holding a yellowed newspaper – one of many that he found boxed in my attic.
“What’s this giant piece of paper, grandpa?” he’ll say.
A tear will form in the corner of one of my eyes and I’ll say softly: “It’s a newspaper.”
Then the little fellow will ask me what a newspaper was and I’ll launch into a long dissertation about how for 250 years most Americans got their news from newspapers and how for much of that time they were delivered to subscribers’ doorsteps each morning.
I’ll talk about how newspapers helped foment dissent among the Colonialists and lit the fuse that became the American Revolution and then became a linchpin in our nation’s democratic foundation. I’ll wax on about how newspaper reporters often were the last bastion against corporate and government corruption and the only journalists who fanned out across this great nation to cover school boards, city councils and water and sewer authority meetings in the most podunk of locales. I’ll talk about how Woodward and Bernstein brought down a corrupt president and, in the process, turned his grandpappy on to a long career and obsession.
My grandson will open the sports page and see stories and photos of athletes ranging from professionals all the way down to Little Leaguers.
“You mean I could have had my picture published while playing a T-ball game?” he’ll ask. And I’ll say: “Yes, if there were still newspapers.”
Then he’ll ask me what happened to newspapers and I’ll try to explain how a business model that stood for centuries gradually crumbled beneath the weight of the Internet.
I’ll talk about the digital revolution and how consumers turned to the Web for their news because it was free and they could get it anytime day or night. I’ll allocute about how the big Internet companies stole newspaper stories through a process called scraping and aggregation and how the newspapers that generated that content, at great expense, got ripped off but didn’t fight back until it was too late.
I’ll talk about PCs and Macs, Google and Yahoo, bloggers and bytes, Blackberries and Twitter, and social networking sites like Facebook. And my grandson will tell me more about these “old” digital developments than I ever knew.
Then I’ll explain how newsprint – the paper newspapers were printed on – was the industry’s biggest expense outside of labor and how those costs started skyrocketing early this century and how when gas hit four bucks a gallon, it made home delivery in sparsely populated areas cost prohibitive.
I’ll explain how smaller newspapers held on for longer than their metro counterparts and how the 150-year-old Rocky Mountain News, the 146-year-old Seattle Post-Intelligencer and 138-year-old Tucson Citizen all died in 2009.
My grandson will ask what I miss most about newspapers – beyond the career and income – and I’ll talk about sitting in this very porch swing next to a steaming cup of coffee and how I could travel the world in the span of two dozen pages.
I could learn about riots in Italy, the collapse of the Japanese stock market, laws passed in Richmond, Nashville and Washington, D.C., and how the Tennessee High football team was faring. I could play the Sudoku and crossword puzzles, read the funnies, get the latest on health care advances, find out which of my friends had died, read editorials hammering the city council for wasting tax dollars, get advice from Ann Landers’ granddaughter, see how many points my favorite NBA player scored and where my favorite NASCAR driver was in the points standings, and get gardening tips.
Then my grandson will yawn, touch a button on his wristwatch, turning the face into a tiny computer screen, and start texting his fourth-grade classmates. And I’ll pick up my cup of coffee and then the yellowed newspaper my grandson left behind.
And I’ll cry some more.

J. Todd Foster is managing editor of the Bristol Herald Courier and can be reached at or (276) 645-2513.