Coffee and a newspaper
My favorite way to start the day
Sunday mornings were made for coffee and a newspaper. Not coffee and a laptop, or coffee and Kindle. Remember newspapers?
For much less than the cost of a cup of coffee in a cappucino palace, you could get news, features, circulars with sales that made you want to go shopping, a couple of puzzles to save for Sunday afternoon and even comic strips in color. We could sit at the kitchen table and trade sections to read after throwing out the obvious junk bundled with the newspaper. The first items to go in the trash are those flyers promising a free, no-obligation lunch in exchange for an investment or retirement income pitch.
In 1981, I graduated from college with a degree in journalism. There were two good dailies in the Tampa Bay area back then, lots of weeklies and an evening paper that had its own columnists and staff. My first job was at a weekly where I wrote features, news, op-eds, film reviews and weepy stories designed to solicit donations for needy folks during the Christmas season. I met my future husband, the paper’s one-man sports department, there. He also wrote features and news, but he primarily covered the then-awful Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the long-departed Tampa Bay Rowdies. It was love at first deadline.
My connection with papers goes way back to a childhood days spent with my father’s family while my parents worked. After midday dinner, my grandfather read the newpaper and everyone discussed what he read. At some point, their rocking chairs would stop creaking as they fell into their siestas and it would be my turn to look through the newspaper I couldn’t read yet.
I so wanted to be a part of their discussion that it made me want to learn to read early. At four, I could read as well as any second-grader. Papers have always been magical items to me, especially after we moved to New York in 1966, where there were so many dailies and so many great reporters available for about a dime a copy.
I first read my favorite columnist, Jimmy Breslin, in the Long Island Press, which is now Newsday as a kid in the library. There’s never been anyone better at capturing the human side of a story and in expressing anger at those who take advantage of the poor. Breslin is still my hero to this day. “Rage is the only quality which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing columns for newspapers,” as he once put it.
Journalists who work their way up to a twice-weekly column or a Sunday spot and waste it on being clever or doing easy pieces betray the legacy of Breslin. I still remember how well he captured the fear and hysteria on the streets when Son of Sam, the serial killer, was terrorizing New York.
Breslin is in his late 70s, but he still writes an occasional column for Newsday with his usual flair for covering a story from the ground up. He talks to ordinary people instead of to spokespeople and poobahs. Here’s one he wrote in 2004 during an antiwar protest in New York. He talked to a little person who was suffering instead of covering the event itself with the rest of the press corps. The little person’s sorrow is often the forgotten angle when all camera lenses at pointed at protests and natural disasters.
Collecting books for their own sake isn’t my thing, but one of my eBay triumphs was scoring a first edition of Breslin’s The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight with his signature on the title page. I treasure it. Another favorite Breslin quote: “Media–the plural of mediocrity.”
Andrew Sarris’ film reviews in The Village Voice and the wonderful op-eds in The New York Times were some of my other favorite reads, even though the Times was above my reading level then. And why did they use ”Mister” in their attributions even if they were talking about Jimi Hendrix? He never seemed a “Mister” to me, but Times style ruled.
Most of the time, our daily newspaper consisted of the New York Daily News that my Dad bought because the liked their sports columnists. Dick Young and Phil Pepe covered his beloved Yankees. Bill Gallo’s cartoons were easy enough to get, unlike the Herblock-style editorial cartoons that I was too young to understand.
I have fond memories of loving newspapers and working for them during a time when print still mattered. These days, the medium is changing into online versions of papers I read then and millions of blogs that have provided all of us with our printing presses.
Bloggers and alternative news sites are changing news coverage. The big publications became too expensive too maintain, too static in their coverage of breaking news and too stodgy in their corporate coverage of issues. Without the Internet, we’d be stuck with local papers or no papers at all. The Web allows us to find citizen journalism, issues that the networks and the corporate publishers won’t cover and even columnists who express the same rage that made Breslin my favorite.
I know an older gentleman who insists that print is already dead. He reads The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and his local paper on his computer every morning. He gets his books on Kindle and his news updates via iPhone. Paper never reaches his breakfast table. Very few people I know still read daily papers or even care that they’re withering away.
To me, there’s still something satisfying about starting the day with a newspaper and a cup of strong coffee. Even if I’ve read the stories on the Web the evening before, turning pages and scanning items is a relaxing way to wake up and face the day. The city columnist in my daily paper isn’t very good, which means that I miss reading Breslin every morning.
More ink is used in covering pro sports in Tampa Bay than on human interest stories, but the beauty of any paper is that you can turn the page if there’s something you don’t want to read. I love good photography and our local paper is strong there. Sometimes a single photo can tell a long story.
Those of us who read newspapers are in the minority these days, but there will always be a market for print, in my view. Try folding your computer screen in half to do a crossword on your lap while sitting in your screened porch on a Sunday afternoon or clipping out part of your Kindle to post by your desk when a photo in print captures your eye. Long live newspapers!
