The morning jitters just get worse

Too many newsroom executives are so deeply imbedded in that mechanical culture, they are slow to adapt to electronic alternatives. Some can’t or won’t adopt at all. They prefer to ride out this info-technology endgame until personal retirement or until their embrace of the dead tree industry ends in a forest denuded of everything but computer screens.

My newspaper didn’t come this morning. Am I grumpy? You bet. And so’s my labradoodle, Jack.
He and I walk out to the front porch every morning at 5. He does what he needs to do. I look for what I need – my ink and newsprint fix. A sensitive animal, Jack picks up on my moody empty-feeling when the paper is not there.
Dogs and newspaper readers have a lot in common. No, I don’t mean the puppy puddle training stage on yellowing newsprint. I mean regular, repetitive reward for behavior is what conditions us.
It’s the open secret of newspaper circulation departments.
They interrupt our training pattern at their peril.
I can if I must skip the printed edition yet still get the news and features.
My laptop is primed and ready to dispense a lot more information than the broadsheet and from far more sources.
At 5 a.m. the regional news and weather are coming on TV. CNN is already telling me what the world markets are doing and what the overnight events are. Why, wonder of wonders, that includes even those occurrences since the local editors put to bed the newspaper, the one that didn’t rise and shine anyway.
Non-delivery simply underscores the anachronism of the printed word.
But the paper remains a comfort to hold in the hand, to turn the pages, to have an outward and physical sign of the inward sense of place where it’s published.
How comforting it is to get mad at its opinions or to mentally upbraid the columnists or to disagree with the selection of news. The faux anger gets my day started.
I love a paper I can hate and still keep coming back to. As long as it keeps coming back to me!
Oh, I could call the newspaper office where someone would dispatch a replacement carried by a fawning, apologetic route manager tugging his forelock and promising to do better if I just won’t drop my subscription.
I’m hooked. I won’t drop. But it will happen again that the paper won’t show up. And again. And again in a random string of unpredictable breaks in the delivery ritual. Even now I’m surprised when the paper does arrive on time and unsurprised but still petulant when it does not.
The newspaper factory is a relic of industrial technology with an infinite number of things that can go wrong on the transmission belt that ends at Jack’s and my doorstep.
Forget all the modernization and good intentions, which are considerable.
The mechanism of newspaper production wheezes and creaks and ultimately depends on some scarcely paid, non-professional driver to open bundles in the nighttime and to wrap a rubber band around a paper (double wrapping it with plastic in bad weather) and to get it to me before I get cranky for having to wait.
Too many newsroom executives are so deeply imbedded in that mechanical culture, they are slow to adapt to electronic alternatives. Some can’t or won’t adopt at all. They prefer to ride out this info-technology endgame until personal retirement or until their embrace of the dead tree industry ends in a forest denuded of everything but computer screens.
Established readers like me encourage the old ways with memory feelings of romance. And of habit.

A comfort level with some frequency

I didn’t quit listening to radio. Radio quit me.
I steal that line from Ronald Reagan, who said it about Democrats. He was a guy on a mic before going into another kind of make believe as an actor and politician. He used to phony up sports broadcasts to make them sound live.
And that’s it with pop radio isn’t it? Hype, whistle, wham, bam, thank you, ma’am.
There was a time when radio played it natural. I liked it like that, as comfortable as a movie matinee. Then came TV, audience and ad competition, and marketing and the Top 40. Bummer.
I knew something was wrong years ago when Del Rio, Texas sold autographed pictures of Jesus on the air.
National Public Radio is winning me back. I guess it’s a demographic thing.
Sanity is reclaiming the airwaves. I may not be alone in my opinion, at least in my fan class.
The local university station plays NPR the first half of the day for the faculty and off-campus neighborhoods. The students don’t start listening until the second half when rock starts. Hard.
When the kids graduate, they may not take the frazzling frequency along.
College grads are not big fans of commercial radio, turns out. Edison Market Research shows non-college grads listen more. But listeners who have a diploma tend to count themselves in the NPR audience.
Part of the explanation may be the increase of workplace radio listening, which is significant among college graduates. Thirty percent of those choose the Internet for listening, compared with 12 percent among non college graduates.
Hey, I think we’re sick of obnoxious radio, which is impossible to work by. It helps that NPR is slightly boring to the young, so it is attractive to the rest of us, cultural instead of counter-cultural and not demanding of our full attention while we are otherwise occupied.
Radio needs to be more like the later Ronald Reagan. A milder delivery plays gentle on the mind. The message seems credible that way, or at least more than sham sports or religious relics with counterfeit signatures.