Today is the last day the Christian Science Monitor publishes a daily paper. To make obvious why, I will tell you that I read the editor’s Note of Metamorphosis online, and that I found note in a Mediabistro.com email, which I read even before I hit the site this morning.
But it still makes me a little weepy. Not because I write for them, which I often and still do, but because I that paper blew my world open when I was in high school. I was a research nerd, looking up articles to build into my speech and debate projects and delving full-throttle into The Research Paper, and that sort of thing. We had a daily paper in Wheeling, West Virginia–we had two, believe it or not, although they’re owned by the same people and print mostly the same kind of stuff and the real difference between them only ever was if you were a morning-coffee or post-work-beer with-your-news kinda person–and it ran stories from the AP, like every other paper.
But when I finally dug up a copy of the Monitor, which we couldn’t get at our high school library, I remember thinking, “Wow. I’ve never seen the world quite like this.” Today I’d said it’s about their sensibility–their decisions about what makes a good story, and which parts of the world are important, and what, even, a story is.
They’ll keep that up on the web, and in the weekly print magazine. Which I urge you to subscribe to, and which I urge them to break down and sell on New York newsstands.
And to be honest, I’m really glad I won’t have all those newspapers piling up every week, and then adding to the recycling burden of the world… But I’ll mark this moment with a sigh, at least, and then move back on to my digital world…
I’m with you on this one!!! As a subscriber to the printed sheet I’m really going to miss all of the world focus of the CSMonitor which is lacking in other papers. As a one-eyed (accident), near-sighted, elderly woman I find trying to read from a computer monitor extremely difficult! (And I can’t afford the ink and paper to print it out myself.) I’ll still subscribe to the weekly magazine, but it won’t be as rich and fulfilling to me or others in similar circumstances. Alas, as with all of history the young take precedence with I-Pods, Twittering, Blackberries, and all those other things old hands can no longer manipulate. Goodbye to my old printed world!
the monitor, the rocky mountain news… scary, eh?