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Letter to the editor

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Electronic newspaper worth a try, someday

By JAN GLIDEWELL, Times Columnist
Published December 30, 2007

My guess is that it will take some time to get used to it, but for several reasons I am going to give my favorite daily newspaper's new electronic edition a chance.

This is as good a place as any to say that I am only speaking for myself on this subject. I am no longer an employee of the St. Petersburg Times; I just sell them one column a month as a vendor (for, ahem, the same price for four years now, Boss).

They would, in fact, probably just as soon I kept my mouth shut on what I think about the move toward electronic publication.

Even before I retired, I wasn't involved in marketing strategy sessions or long-range planning, so what I say here I say as a customer and consumer.

It has to be fairly clear that we can't go on chopping trees and choking landfills in order to transmit information. I can remember the days when newspapers raised an editorial stink over the problem of disposable diapers and landfills ... until it came out that the diapers - substantially - compress and newspapers don't.

I spend a little more than two months every summer in an isolated cabin in Colorado, where I have access to satellite television but not - unless I drive 30 miles or so - a daily newspaper.

Television news does some things extremely well, especially when there is a real national crisis going on that deals with something more substantial than Britney's body parts or the fascinating discovery that some people enter the country illegally.

Even though mid '70s media guru Marshall McLuhan saw it somewhat differently, broadcast news still tends to be linear in that you have to listen to it from the beginning until it gets (if ever) to what interests you - while printed news, especially as used in newspapers, gives you the chance to scan a printed page carrying a lot of information, and zero in on what you want to see.

But that convenience has come at a cost: bulk.

During the 10 weeks I spend in Colorado I fill two standard-size garbage cans twice. I carry out the same amount of bulk at home in a single week. It is true that two people live in my home, but still a substantial percentage of our refuse is paper, including that other great tree-killer, junk mail.

I have told younger colleagues for years (although their eyes glaze over when they think that I might start beginning sentences with phrases like "Back when ... ") that the days of printed newspapers were limited.

But don't worry; it isn't going to happen overnight. People have very emotional attachments to newspapers and how they feel, look or are handled. Tabloids were invented so they could be more easily read by subway strap-hangers, and they got their reputation for salacious contents because of the "screamer" headlines necessary to effect newsstand sales before home-delivery took over a more substantial portion of the market.

When the Times moved the crossword puzzle once, it really bugged people who were used to folding the newspaper a certain way so they could do the puzzle with their morning coffee - and you don't want to hear about the initial reaction when the horoscope column was moved. It wasn't pretty.

Every change of typeface, type size, column width or page width that I have seen over the past 40 years has, in general, occasioned more comment (almost all of it negative) than whatever news was actually in the paper.

I have always said that, for me, (putting this as delicately as possible) the watershed moment would be when I could take a computerized newspaper into the bathroom with me in the morning.

The ability to download the entire online edition with a single click, and the advent of smaller and lighter laptops sort of removed my last remaining objection.

I am, however, going to wait until after the 2008 general election to go electronic, since shredding, flinging or otherwise mangling the media messenger will be less likely to make my morning read too expensive.

It is one thing to rip up a newspaper over the latest nonsensical quote from a presidential hopeful, but quite another to physically attack and damage several hundred dollars worth of laptop.

Jan Glidewell is a retired St. Petersburg Times columnist who continues to write occasionally for the Pasco and Hernando local news editions of the Times.

[Last modified December 29, 2007, 18:31:31]