On why my newspaper is dying, Part I

I am likely a member of the last generation who will have this memory: sprawled on the living room floor with the evening newspaper -- remember that? the evening newspaper -- scanning the box scores of the previous night's baseball games line by line, but paying particularly close attention to the home runs, wins and saves, because those were the easiest numbers to cull from the small print, the most basic way to judge the quality of a baseball player who otherwise would remain an image on a baseball card or, if he had a really good night, a blip on the evening news sportscast.

Of particular note in this memory is the fact that I did not care that the box scores I was reading were nearly a day old by the time they reached my doorstep. It was the only way to get the numbers. USA Today was still trying to figure how to reach me and ESPN was something like channel 13 on my cable, there was no ESPN2/Classic/U/Deportes. Yet, today it is my responsibility -- for a few weeks more, at least -- to make certain that no one would have to wait more than a few minutes for what I once happily devoured 20 hours after the fact.

I did page layout in college with a wax machine and a roller before I learned Pagemaker. But I found pasteup clunky and inefficient, and dove into computer pagination as soon as I had the opportunity. My first job was at an afternoon paper, but as I was putting nearly day-old news in print for my reader, I was reading fresh news on the Internet at work. At each job since I've been stuck between people absolutely mystified by the technology that was taking over and those who knew almost nothing of the technology it was replacing. A year, two years behind me in college were people who learned QuarkXpress as a matter of course where for me finding a computer on campus that actually had it installed was a challenge. A year, two years behind me were ENGLISH majors who knew PhotoShop, and here I was actually employed in the newspaper industry as a designer and scrambling to learn it. And I was actually ahead of the curve.

Now I work on the Internet. I have spent the past six months undergoing a crash course in something people a few years younger than me already know. And yet again, more or less I'm ahead of the curve. When I look around the newsroom I see people lashing out at all things electronic as if a machine could really be to blame for changing how people want to read news. But it's the readers, myself included, who are driving the change, not the technology. When Baseball Tonight premiered on ESPN, I stopped reading my then-morning newspaper. ESPN gave me what I wanted.

The reason we are where we are today is not because newspapers have embraced a new technology. It's because they didn't embrace it fast enough, and in many ways still haven't embraced it. We bemoan the great plague visited upon us by Craigslist, yet where are we all looking for jobs? That newspapers have failed to counter with our own Craiglists, user-friendly products marketed aggressively to people who prefer the new way to the old way, is why my newspaper is more than likely going to close, why my last newspaper is more than likely going to close, and why there are an ever-shrinking number of jobs available to ever-growing number of unemployed journalists.

Maybe we really do prefer to read the box scores while sprawled on the living room floor. Or maybe we just like the memory too much to recognize it is only a memory.