Love for printed newspapers keeps on burning

A few months ago, before this paper’s declaration of bankruptcy in December and Digital First Media’s $12 million lifeline, I saw an odd scene at Dunkin’ Donuts.

A guy, who looked to be in his early 50s, sat down, set his phone on the table, and spread open a copy of the Boston Herald. He read through every page.

When I asked why he read the real paper instead of the free version on his phone, he mumbled something about being old, that this is the way he’s always done things.

At risk of sounding like somebody who still thinks VHS tapes are a fine way to watch a movie, I say it’s worth considering what we lose as print slowly disappears.

This thought struck me recently as the Herald awaited its fate. I was stuck in bed with a fever, and to pass the time grabbed a copy of “Fahrenheit 451” — the temperature at which paper burns, says its tagline.

Ray Bradbury, 65 years ago, created a dystopian world that startlingly looks a bit like our own. Of course, we don’t yet have firemen who torch books, but we do have a life that’s overwhelmed with information and entertainment, much of it trite and inescapable. Instead of the consuming then-wholly-fictional parlor-wall screens (our own flat screen TVs today come close), we all have small screens we fixate on most of our waking hours. Instead of empty five-minute dramas, we have addictive twominute YouTube clips. Instead of parlor screen “families” who don’t really love us back, we have “followers” and “friends,” the vast majority of whom could not care less if we disappear.

The sinister Captain Beatty even speaks of something strikingly like Twitter when he comments that politics is just “two sentences, a headline!”

“Then,” he says, “in midair, all vanishes! Whirl man’s mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought!”

How does all this link back to the passé printed word, set in ink on pages we can feel, keep, ponder?

As old man Faber, an English professor before books were burned, put it, we need “Leisure … time to think.”

Consider that man in the Dunkin’ Donuts. He could let his mind linger over what he was reading on those pages, not just get hot under the collar at some columnist while scrolling on his phone, before skipping on to other websites, wearing his eyes out on cat videos and eventually getting a case of overload amnesia.

But there’s another advantage of print: It can’t change. What’s online can morph or disappear in an instant. An online newspaper can fold and its archives vanish. A bad government — or cowardly owner — can reword published stories with no trace.

Now, this week, the good news here is the Herald will live on, this city will have two daily newspapers.

The bad news is print everywhere is going the way of … videotapes. The Pew Research Center found that, in 2016, total weekday circulation for newspapers continued down a 28year path of declines, with total weekday circulation plummeting to 35 million, the lowest level in 73 years.

Think this is just the way things are meant to be?

Apparently Bradbury saw this coming when he wrote Faber’s words: “I remember newspapers dying like huge moths. No one wanted them back. No one missed them ... ”