The end of printed newspapers? That’s news to me

I like the heft and smell of printed newspapers, writes Phillip Adams.

For years we’ve been told that the paper is heading for the exit. That the physical newspaper is as doomed as the dodo or dinosaur.

And to dramatise the point many readers are now looking at a screen rather than a paper page. Though a subscriber to the digital edition, I still insist on hard copy for the Weekend Oz.

And it’s not just out of sentiment, though that certainly is a factor.

My first job in media, 70 years ago, was as a paperboy. A paper paperboy. I dragged a billycart loaded with Melbourne Suns and Ages from the local newsagency through the streets of East Melbourne, tossing “orders” with gross inaccuracy at the front doors of terraces – or in the general direction of “flats”, as apartments were known. In wet weather the papers were sodden messes of mâché.

At night I’d load the billycart with Heralds and head for my corner possie where, in return for the gross underpayment of five pence a dozen, I’d dart between cars and jump on and off moving trams. Talk about child labour. It was as dangerous as being sent down a coal mine or up a chimney. Impossible to believe in these days of OHS.

Now many a masthead has been lowered to half-mast. Most of the papers and magazines I wrote for in later years are long gone. From the Communist Guardian (not to be confused with the surviving paper of the same name) to the conservative Bulletin. Goodbye Nation, Nation Review and The National Times wherein I once had bylines. Others linger on in digital form, in a world where soon AI will be writing the stories and columns. Is Time still around? Newsweek? The Readers Digest?

Newspapers were recycled long before formal, fashionable recycling. Not for nothing were newspapers known as fish wraps. Fish ‘n’ chips depended on them. And they often served as toilet paper in outside dunnies, torn into pieces and hung from a rusty nail. They also were used to line drawers or the bottom of birdcages.

On the farm, newspapers were used as mulch for crops. Try any of the foregoing with your digital edition. I knew a newspaper hoarder who piled them up with the intention of revisiting them at some point. He never did. Teetering, tottering towers of Melbourne Heralds, Suns, Argus and Ages for the ages. And yes, a heavenly haven for rodents.

Now to the sentimentality factor. Apart from my early labours in the selling and delivery thereof, I actually like paper papers. I like their heft, even their smell. It’s much the same with books. Give me a real one any day, limp or stiff as naughty Dame Edna calls them, rather than something digitised on a Kindle, whatever that is. Although I make an exception for the halfway house of the audiobook I use to dull the boredom of my 600km commute.

Newspapers. It’s an employment issue. OK, paperboys are no longer a factor. But without papers there’s be no need to “stop the presses”. No presses to start. And newsagents? Not lots to sell except lotto tickets.

I’m told kids don’t read the news, either on paper or screen – that they get what little they know about the world from some Chinese plot called TikTok, not to be confused with the stop watch on 60 Minutes. Tick tock.

Time is running out.