Sunday, July 13, 2008

Sunday Morning Tradition

I like Sunday mornings. There's nothing like eating a leisurely breakfast while reading the newspaper spread out on the table.

The food is the same as ever. Lately, however, the Sunday paper has been falling short of being compelling. With the glut of news available on the web, radio and TV, the paper has become somewhat redundant for getting the hard news. It is still the prime place to go for analysis, local news and quirky stories that don't make it elsewhere.

Without any natural disasters, new political issues, or compelling local sports team action to report, today's paper was pretty humdrum. I got through the whole thing in about 20 minutes. That includes my cursory glance at the advertising.

I know that I am among the rapidly declining population who still read newspapers each day. But this is a habit that I started when I first learned to read the comics, progressed to the sports section, and then finally graduated to consume the whole paper.

For me, reading the paper is tradition. Similar to my family's tradition of passing down interest in baseball, my father read the paper, I read the paper, my son reads the paper, and my oldest grandson has starting reading the sports section and comics.

I'm not at all convinced that this tradition will persist for another generation. It's too bad. Eating while staring at a TV or computer screen just doesn't feel the same.

3 comments:

blythjs said...

I'm reading this while eating and staring at a computer. I don't have to fold the paper over to finish an article. And there's no newsprint on my hands!

Incontrovertible said...

That's all true, but dropping crumbs in the keyboard can be a problem.

Anonymous said...

A good newspaper is like a well crafted album...it tells a complete story and makes the reader a part of the experience. It takes the reader places they may not have explored on their own.

A computer newspaper is like iTunes and you select the singles you want to download. You are happy as a reader as you got what you wanted, but you didn't get an experience and you only got what you expected.