20181117.0430

My wife and I recently began taking the San Antonio Express-News, although it is not quite our local paper. (We live about an hour away from San Antonio, for reference.) It has been interesting thus far; there have been more days than we'd like that have seen our paper delivered either late in the day (in the afternoon, although any "after we leave to go to work" is too late) or not at all, and we find we rarely have the time to sit and read the paper we'd like to have. We thought that we might be able to make a bit more time for it, and, while we can do so on the weekends, during the week, it just never seems to happen.
It's a shame, really, because both my wife and I recognize that there is value to taking a local(ish) newspaper and reading it. There is a viscerally different experience to reading something in print; reading online is still reading, to be sure, but print seems somehow to offer more opportunity for consideration and less in the way of embedded, inherent distraction. Indeed, even as I write this, I find my attention called away by the other windows I have open, although I am not clicking through them to pull up additional information I need to write what I am writing here. When, as is often the case in my more formal blog, I am obliged to click though windows to pull up information I need to support the claims I make, I find myself following side-tracks and interesting bits of trivia, ultimately distracting myself from the task at hand more than the task will necessarily tolerate. It may be the Millennial in me that acts so; I do not know. I do know, though, that print reading does not present the same problem to me.
It is definitely the social-media-connected part of me that finds waiting on the newspaper for news interminable. The articles I see on the front page of the paper are those I saw online before I went to bed the night before--if not earlier in the day yesterday. I read them online and hear about them on the radio long before I have the chance--when I have the chance--to read them in the newspaper for which I 've paid. I seem to want my news to be newer than the day-old, even though I spend and have spent as much time as I do and have looking at things far older than that, and I have less patience with seeing things again than I recall having before.
But that's not really the point of taking the paper, is it? Really, it's an issue not of being informed, as such, so much as an issue of working from a common set of information. It's a community-building thing, really, a way to help us feel like we are a part of the nearest actual city to where we live. And in that, at least, it is doing some good. I don't know that it will be enough for me to renew our subscription when the time comes, but still...