I cannot remember a time when my father did not enjoy reading the Sunday paper. A man’s man when it came to most things, especially team sports, the newspaper has always been his form of quiet relaxation. Since his retirement, he has expanded his subscriptions to include 7-day delivery of several papers, which admittedly creates quite the visual at the end of the driveway in the morning. When the weather is not golf-friendly and his grandkids don’t have a game or meet to attend, he has been known to devour 4-5 papers a day.
As for the internet, Dad has been happily stunted in email – golf jokes forwarded amongst his buddies and keeping up with family and friends across the world. It actually took a month to teach him how to open videos and save pictures to the desktop. That was as digitally savvy as he had any interest in being.
Then, several months ago, out of the blue, Dad asked me how he could bookmark his favorite papers online. “You just add them to your favorites” I told him, rolling my eyes as if he’d ever actually do it. But, together we added the NY Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Washington Post, the London Times and several others. We searched out some sports related papers so that he would never be more than a click away from any score anywhere in the world. When we finished, I told him that if he read all of these papers every day, he would become a computer hermit. He laughed and said “no, now I can just skim them when I only have an hour or so.”
The other evening I entered his house to find him at the computer, tea in hand, getting the European football scores (soccer to us) from the Irish Times. “I added a few more papers to my favorites” was his first response to seeing me. He went on to tell me that he used “The Google” to find them.
Although he says he will never stop reading the Sunday paper as long as it is being published, even Dad sees the positives to online access. We have been hearing lots of news about the over 60 crowd joining Facebook at record numbers, but when they start putting down the physical paper and bookmarking the New York Times, that is when I know that there probably is no hope for the failing newspaper business. Having majored in Journalism in college, it saddens me a bit, but it excites me even more.
