By Tony Norman
NSNC President
Early in the morning of Feb. 26, the last edition of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that would ever be printed on a Friday landed on stoops, porches, sidewalks, lawns, and hedges with the indifference most of us had grown used to over the years.
It wasn’t the last Friday edition because the Post-Gazette ceased publication entirely. The family that owns the newspaper along with the Toledo Blade and a handful of cable stations in Appalachia and the South is eager to transition to digital-only to spare itself the labor and production costs of being in the newspaper business.
The paperless Friday version of the Post-Gazette now joins paperless Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Saturday, leaving Thursday and Sunday as the only actual newspaper delivery days.
It doesn’t take a blue ribbon panel of futurists to know what’s likely to happen to the last two remaining days of the printed Pittsburgh Post-Gazette over the next two years.
There was no note from the publisher or anyone on the paper’s masthead reminding the reader that the last day of a familiar ritual had arrived.
Unless subscribers happened to have read a story published several weeks ago about the plan to cease printing and delivering the PG on Fridays, they would have no idea that what they were casually thumbing through at breakfast tables across the region was a genuine keepsake — an artifact from a bygone era of conscientious civic engagement.
That last printed Friday edition of the PG is significant for professional and personal reasons as well. As a twice-a-week general interest columnist (not counting a Sunday-only business column twice a month) Friday was the only day my column appeared in print after the printed Tuesday edition ceased publishing a year ago.
While reading the last edition containing the last column with my face above it that would ever run in a printed newspaper again, I knew it would continue to run in daily electronic editions and on the PG’s website. Still, it wouldn’t be the same.
Reading the column on a screen doesn’t generate the same thrill for me that spreading it out on the kitchen table does. I enjoyed seeing what opinion pieces were selected to accompany my column into print.
What outrageous juxtapositions would result from the political differences generated by my liberalism versus the editorial page’s pro-Trump tilt? Seeing the arrangement of the pieces on the page itself was always an unstated drama.
Because I write my own headlines, I always second-guess how effective they are when reading them in print. Anything in the column that I got wrong can be changed online, but what appears in the printed paper is the only definitive version as far as subscribers are concerned. I’m going to miss that anxiety.
Intellectually, I know that being a columnist whose columns are accessible only on screen doesn’t make me any less of a columnist. My paycheck doesn’t suddenly shrink. Neither does the number of days my columns appear.
The only thing missing is the tactile experience that comes with reading a column in an actual printed newspaper. I’m still a columnist. I’m no longer a newspaper columnist because the newspaper only exists on the two days my column doesn’t run.
I’m sure I could ask to be moved to Thursday and Sunday print editions, but I prefer the days I currently have at the beginning and end of the workweek. And there’s no point in changing days now when Thursday and Sunday print versions have already begun an inexorable march to digital-only, too.
There’s been so much disruption and chaos in the newspaper industry in recent years that the PG’s decision to cease print publication for five out of seven days barely merits a yawn outside the region.
Too many newspapers have actually closed and too many journalists have been laid off or left the business entirely to moan too much about a publishing family’s decision to stop printing physical papers because they’re convinced the strategy will give them some kind of strategic advantage in the future.
The fact is that only the biggest national papers — The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal — have figured out how to leverage and monetize their online readership without sacrificing print versions of their very popular and important news product.
Some smaller regional papers like the Minneapolis Star-Tribune have also figured out how to increase online readership without jettisoning its print coverage that it considers crucial to serving and expanding the most necessary element of democratic freedom — a well-informed public.
All of these superior and profitable media companies acknowledge an obvious fact: Not every citizen has access to computer screens, tablets, or cellphones with which to read the paper.
Printed newspapers are also relatively cheap and easy to acquire regardless of one’s socioeconomic status. For that reason alone they’re the most perfect technology we currently have for conveying news and opinion to the broadest cross section of the public.
As I scanned the headlines, the previous night’s hockey score, the obits, the letters to the editor that have the habit of being more enlightening than the editorials that generated them, the correction box, the ads, the curiously placed front-section stories, the random drama of tragedies in the local section, and the futile optimism of the comics page, I allowed myself one last, wistful sigh.
The world doesn’t care that printed newspapers are going away, either by suicidal mismanagement, marketplace failure, or the result of being sold off after being stripped for parts and profit by brutal hedge funds. The fate of the self-important columnists who once enjoyed the privilege of face and name recognition with local newspaper readers is of even less concern to folks trying to survive a once-a-century pandemic.
It’s a humbling reality that I’ll adjust to even while silently mourning the passing of what once felt like a golden age in mass communication when I joined the newspaper in 1988.
I’m even going to miss fighting with the delivery route people about their inability to employ drivers interested in throwing the paper within 15 feet of my front door on rainy or snowy days. I’m not going to miss the awkward hints for Christmas money stuffed in newspapers weeks before the holiday starts.
I’m no longer a newspaper columnist, but I’m still a columnist for a news outlet. I should take plenty of consolation in that, but it still feels as if we’ve lost something very essential to our local identity with the disappearance of the Friday paper. We know it is a harbinger to a paperless future within earshot.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is the oldest continuously printed newspaper in Pennsylvania, I believe, so the slow shuffle toward a digital-only future also feels like the world’s slowest goodbye. I don’t say that as a columnist. I’m saying that as a very disappointed citizen.
Well, there are always podcasts…
Tony Norman is NSNC President (2020-2022) and an award winning columnist with The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
