Regarding the smudging of English newspapers: remember the butlers in downtown Abbey or upstairs downstairs …. They had to iron the newspaper to fix the ink and avoid the smudging of Sir’s hands.
Lovely post. I have started to read more print newspapers and magazines in the past few months as I try to reduce screen time. And I remember hearing Anwar making this point in class a generation ago.
Your paean to newspapers past reminds me of an incident in 1990, shortly after I moved from the USA to London. I was on the underground with another USA person; she looked at the newspaper being read by the man opposite us, and just from the "look" of the page, recognized it. "Oh", she gasped, "it's a New York Times!" The man lowered his newspaper, looked at us for a moment, then folded it and handed it over. "Here, ladies," he said, "you obviously need this more than me". Bless him. Wherever he is now, I send him my thanks.
Reading the daily newspapers in print is one of my daily rituals every morning. Fortunately here in DC I can still get both the Washington Post and the New York Times delivered every morning. While I also read online, reading the print version gives a different take on the news, particularly with the placement of articles on the front page highlighting the editors´ judgement on the relative importance of news. My father-in-law Jim Sunshine, who recently died at the age of 99, was a journalist and editor over more than 40 years of his career at the Providence Journal in Rhode Island. Once I learned from him how the front-page layout was determined in repeated editorial conference in the 12 hours or so before the paper went to press. He would undoubtedly be pleased that the Providence Journal editors, despite its decline in being purchased by a chain of newspapers, decided to put his obituary on the front page: https://www.providencejournal.com/story/news/local/2024/01/11/jim-sunshine-longtime-providence-journal-reporter-and-editor-dies-at-99/72162370007/
Dear Mr. Milanovic. Thank you for this beautiful essay. It all feels so familiar, the smell, the feel, it makes me long for those innocent bygone days of newspaper reading.
Regarding the Wall Street Journal, I agree that the news itself can be trusted as much if not more than most mainstream media in the US. I remember just before the US invasion of Iraq, when the Bush administration officials including President Bush himself, Secretary of State Powell, Vice-President Cheney, and Deputy National Security Adviser Hadley all had been using the debriefing, after his defection, of Saddam Hussein's son-in-law Hussein Kamel, who had been in charge of many of Iraq's secret weapons programs and had admitted that Iraq had produced WMD, as proof that the WMD still existed. The New York Times also repeatedly reported these admissions of Kamel, as did all of the mainstream US media. All of the mainstream media were waving the flag and driving public opinion toward war, equating any questioning of or opposition to the Bush administration desire for war as equivalent to supporting Saddam Hussein, making it almost treasonous to oppose the war.
Then in February, a month before the March invasion of Iraq, Newsweek broke a story based on a secret IAEA and UNSCOM debriefing document in which Kamel, after admitting that Iraq had built WMD, also revealed that Iraq had destroyed all of its WMD. Bush, Powell, Cheney, Hadley all had access to this information, and intentionally promoted the first part that Iraq had built WMD, and intentionally hid the second part of the debriefing of Kemal that Iraq had destroyed their WMD. The only mainstream media company that picked up the Newsweek story was the Wall Street Journal. Not the New York Times or the Washington Post, not NBC, CBS, ABC, or Fox. Only Newsweek and the Wall Street Journal reported Kamel's assertion that the WMD had already been destroyed, and even they underplayed the story; but at least they published it. So yes, I agree with you, I think the Wall Street Journal, at least in the days before Murdoch, could be trusted to relatively honestly report the news.
It is a super important comment that you make, I did not read the WSJ then. The extent of propaganda in the mainstream newspapers (NYT and the WaPo) was unbearable. Yet the WaPo published a small letter that I wrote then. And one morning (I will never forget it) a very nice person who somehow found my phone number called me to say how much he appreciated what I wrote. He woke me up but I never loved being woken up more than then.
“and you had to wash them practically every time after you read the paper. I thought that it was some cool British custom “
It was the print unions! Murdoch broke them when he moved the Times to Wapping, and modernised practices and technology. But he also degraded the Times from the paper of record to a more optimistic version of the Daily Mail....
Germany still has great papers. The FAZ only started printing colour photographs about 10 years ago...
It is not just newspapers: I have been reading for a long time some USA "business magazines" as because they are target to an "aligned" readership they can afford to be more candid than others, and they have been having trouble too.
For example in recent years "Fortune" has been reduced to 6 issues per year, and recently they cancelled my $10/issue subscription to switch to a $37.90/issue "Premium" subscription. Since $37.90/issue is ridiculous even for a high quality magazine it seems likely to me that the publishers want to destroy its subscriber base to close it down once and for all, a sad develelopment.
Even "BusinessWeek" has been reduced to a footnote on the Bloomberg.com website, another sad event. I keep being astonished by the prices on Substack.com as a single columnist subscription usually is around $60 year, which is very expensive compared to subscribing to traditional media. Even something as expensive as Economist.com is only the price of 5 Substack.com columnists.
And besides Spain, it is Italy then :) And Germany. But I have to say, Italian politics, economy, and love of sports is much more fun then Germany which became a grey state in the Merkel years
Well, I could accept the premise that the "news" in the WSJ is perhaps mostly fact based (to the extent that it is not polluted by alphabet agency manipulation that afflicts all of the Western corporate media organs) but that does NOT extend to either its columnists nor its editorial content. In that regard it's just a flagrant apologist for market fundamentalism.
«the "news" in the WSJ is perhaps mostly fact based [...] columnists nor its editorial content. In that regard it's just a flagrant apologist for market fundamentalism.»
Nothing new there, here is a quote from the diary of H. MacMillan in 1963, after retiring from being UK Prime Minister:
“It is wonderful not to read the newspapers — except a rapid glance through The Times. It makes such a difference. One feels better, mentally and morally, not to be absorbing unconsciously, all that steady stream of falsehood, innuendo, poison which makes up the Press today, apart from purely informative sections.”
In 1814 T. Jefferson has already written in a letter:
“I deplore with you the putrid state into which our newspapers have passed, and the malignity, the vulgarity, & mendacious spirit of those who write for them: and I inclose you a recent sample, the production of a New-England judge, as a proof of the abyss of degradation into which we are fallen. these ordures are rapidly depraving the public taste, and lessening it’s relish for sound food. as vehicles of information, and a curb on our functionaries they have rendered themselves useless by forfeiting all title to belief.”
What I miss most about the traditional newspapers are the many little stories they printed, which arguably were also used to just fill the space. No teasers, and there were five or ten of them on a page and they were read as quickly as they were ignored. Also today's emaciated but highly expensive print papers are a totally different best than the gloriously fat papers until ca. 1995, when the "rivers of gold", the endless streams of money from classified advertising started to run out. I remember the Saturday LA Times of those days which came in to segments, folded in have about ten centimetres thick each and the lot weighing several kilogrammes. And even a normal weekday edition of a broadsheet could wreck an excellent interior design, at least the way I ended up spreading them around. My shtick requires me to often read ancient newspapers in libraries, and I am painfully aware what I am missing out on thanks to the Interweb. However, in a different way I get more than compensated.
Regarding the smudging of English newspapers: remember the butlers in downtown Abbey or upstairs downstairs …. They had to iron the newspaper to fix the ink and avoid the smudging of Sir’s hands.
Branko, thank you so much for your comments. Please keep them coming. They are INTERESTING.
More than just "interesting", I hope. :-)
Lovely post. I have started to read more print newspapers and magazines in the past few months as I try to reduce screen time. And I remember hearing Anwar making this point in class a generation ago.
Thank you so much, Rajiv.
Your paean to newspapers past reminds me of an incident in 1990, shortly after I moved from the USA to London. I was on the underground with another USA person; she looked at the newspaper being read by the man opposite us, and just from the "look" of the page, recognized it. "Oh", she gasped, "it's a New York Times!" The man lowered his newspaper, looked at us for a moment, then folded it and handed it over. "Here, ladies," he said, "you obviously need this more than me". Bless him. Wherever he is now, I send him my thanks.
Reading the daily newspapers in print is one of my daily rituals every morning. Fortunately here in DC I can still get both the Washington Post and the New York Times delivered every morning. While I also read online, reading the print version gives a different take on the news, particularly with the placement of articles on the front page highlighting the editors´ judgement on the relative importance of news. My father-in-law Jim Sunshine, who recently died at the age of 99, was a journalist and editor over more than 40 years of his career at the Providence Journal in Rhode Island. Once I learned from him how the front-page layout was determined in repeated editorial conference in the 12 hours or so before the paper went to press. He would undoubtedly be pleased that the Providence Journal editors, despite its decline in being purchased by a chain of newspapers, decided to put his obituary on the front page: https://www.providencejournal.com/story/news/local/2024/01/11/jim-sunshine-longtime-providence-journal-reporter-and-editor-dies-at-99/72162370007/
Poetic last line. Thanks Branko!
I’m a young person who reads a lot of newspapers, but admittedly all on my phone. The print has a texture that’s unbeatable though, undoubtedly.
Yes, the texture matters.
> But I love the print newspapers
Why? They're good for telling you what to think without any way to independently check what they write.
Dear Mr. Milanovic. Thank you for this beautiful essay. It all feels so familiar, the smell, the feel, it makes me long for those innocent bygone days of newspaper reading.
Regarding the Wall Street Journal, I agree that the news itself can be trusted as much if not more than most mainstream media in the US. I remember just before the US invasion of Iraq, when the Bush administration officials including President Bush himself, Secretary of State Powell, Vice-President Cheney, and Deputy National Security Adviser Hadley all had been using the debriefing, after his defection, of Saddam Hussein's son-in-law Hussein Kamel, who had been in charge of many of Iraq's secret weapons programs and had admitted that Iraq had produced WMD, as proof that the WMD still existed. The New York Times also repeatedly reported these admissions of Kamel, as did all of the mainstream US media. All of the mainstream media were waving the flag and driving public opinion toward war, equating any questioning of or opposition to the Bush administration desire for war as equivalent to supporting Saddam Hussein, making it almost treasonous to oppose the war.
Then in February, a month before the March invasion of Iraq, Newsweek broke a story based on a secret IAEA and UNSCOM debriefing document in which Kamel, after admitting that Iraq had built WMD, also revealed that Iraq had destroyed all of its WMD. Bush, Powell, Cheney, Hadley all had access to this information, and intentionally promoted the first part that Iraq had built WMD, and intentionally hid the second part of the debriefing of Kemal that Iraq had destroyed their WMD. The only mainstream media company that picked up the Newsweek story was the Wall Street Journal. Not the New York Times or the Washington Post, not NBC, CBS, ABC, or Fox. Only Newsweek and the Wall Street Journal reported Kamel's assertion that the WMD had already been destroyed, and even they underplayed the story; but at least they published it. So yes, I agree with you, I think the Wall Street Journal, at least in the days before Murdoch, could be trusted to relatively honestly report the news.
It is a super important comment that you make, I did not read the WSJ then. The extent of propaganda in the mainstream newspapers (NYT and the WaPo) was unbearable. Yet the WaPo published a small letter that I wrote then. And one morning (I will never forget it) a very nice person who somehow found my phone number called me to say how much he appreciated what I wrote. He woke me up but I never loved being woken up more than then.
“and you had to wash them practically every time after you read the paper. I thought that it was some cool British custom “
It was the print unions! Murdoch broke them when he moved the Times to Wapping, and modernised practices and technology. But he also degraded the Times from the paper of record to a more optimistic version of the Daily Mail....
Germany still has great papers. The FAZ only started printing colour photographs about 10 years ago...
It is not just newspapers: I have been reading for a long time some USA "business magazines" as because they are target to an "aligned" readership they can afford to be more candid than others, and they have been having trouble too.
For example in recent years "Fortune" has been reduced to 6 issues per year, and recently they cancelled my $10/issue subscription to switch to a $37.90/issue "Premium" subscription. Since $37.90/issue is ridiculous even for a high quality magazine it seems likely to me that the publishers want to destroy its subscriber base to close it down once and for all, a sad develelopment.
Even "BusinessWeek" has been reduced to a footnote on the Bloomberg.com website, another sad event. I keep being astonished by the prices on Substack.com as a single columnist subscription usually is around $60 year, which is very expensive compared to subscribing to traditional media. Even something as expensive as Economist.com is only the price of 5 Substack.com columnists.
You went to high school in Belgium? And yet read French newspapers? Twice funny lol.
As for the British ink, did you arrive in Britain after Thatcher broke the printers' unions? Their revenge would be one explanation...
And besides Spain, it is Italy then :) And Germany. But I have to say, Italian politics, economy, and love of sports is much more fun then Germany which became a grey state in the Merkel years
I'm double about this. At home, i read newspapers on my phone. When travelling, i love buying and reading a local paper in print.
Well, I could accept the premise that the "news" in the WSJ is perhaps mostly fact based (to the extent that it is not polluted by alphabet agency manipulation that afflicts all of the Western corporate media organs) but that does NOT extend to either its columnists nor its editorial content. In that regard it's just a flagrant apologist for market fundamentalism.
«the "news" in the WSJ is perhaps mostly fact based [...] columnists nor its editorial content. In that regard it's just a flagrant apologist for market fundamentalism.»
Nothing new there, here is a quote from the diary of H. MacMillan in 1963, after retiring from being UK Prime Minister:
“It is wonderful not to read the newspapers — except a rapid glance through The Times. It makes such a difference. One feels better, mentally and morally, not to be absorbing unconsciously, all that steady stream of falsehood, innuendo, poison which makes up the Press today, apart from purely informative sections.”
In 1814 T. Jefferson has already written in a letter:
“I deplore with you the putrid state into which our newspapers have passed, and the malignity, the vulgarity, & mendacious spirit of those who write for them: and I inclose you a recent sample, the production of a New-England judge, as a proof of the abyss of degradation into which we are fallen. these ordures are rapidly depraving the public taste, and lessening it’s relish for sound food. as vehicles of information, and a curb on our functionaries they have rendered themselves useless by forfeiting all title to belief.”
What I miss most about the traditional newspapers are the many little stories they printed, which arguably were also used to just fill the space. No teasers, and there were five or ten of them on a page and they were read as quickly as they were ignored. Also today's emaciated but highly expensive print papers are a totally different best than the gloriously fat papers until ca. 1995, when the "rivers of gold", the endless streams of money from classified advertising started to run out. I remember the Saturday LA Times of those days which came in to segments, folded in have about ten centimetres thick each and the lot weighing several kilogrammes. And even a normal weekday edition of a broadsheet could wreck an excellent interior design, at least the way I ended up spreading them around. My shtick requires me to often read ancient newspapers in libraries, and I am painfully aware what I am missing out on thanks to the Interweb. However, in a different way I get more than compensated.
This brought me back to pouring over the Saturday Globe & Mail in my parents' house in Montreal. Wonderful times that I sorely miss.