I read the news today, oh boy,
About a lucky man who made the grade,
And though the news was rather sad,
I just had to laugh,
I saw the photograph*
After we came home from church, most Sundays would
find my mother in the kitchen cooking our Sunday dinner while my father sat in
his favorite chair in the living room reading the Press. I would lie on the living room floor, reading
my favorite sections of the newspaper scattered around me. Besides the Comics and Sports, I liked to
look at the magazine sections. The TV Graphic contained brief descriptions of television
shows for the coming week and told you if the show was a repeat. The Sunday Roto had pictures of scenes from
around town. This Week Magazine had plenty interesting articles on various
subjects.
When I became an adult and had to pay for my own
newspaper, I had to decide what paper I wanted to read. The Post-Gazette was the morning paper,
so I could read it on the bus during my morning commute. As a bonus, I could continue reading it when
I got to work during my first cup of coffee.
On the other hand, the Press would not be delivered until the
afternoon, which meant I had to read it on my own time after I returned home from
work. Plus, I had a history with the Post-Gazette
from my days as a paperboy. I also preferred
their editorial page to the more conservative views of the Press.
The Press went away after the newspaper strike of 1992. The Greensburg Tribune-Review expanded
to the Pittsburgh market to fill the void left by the Press’s demise. The Trib was owned by conservative
mogul Richard Mellon Scaife, which kept me from ever seriously considering it
as an option.
When I retired in 2012, I continued to start my
morning with the Post-Gazette over several cups of coffee. During this time, news via electronic outlets
on the internet, such as Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, and The
Daily Beast, began to seriously compete with print newspapers. In September of 2019, the Post-Gazette
announced that they would publish print editions only three days a week.
But by then I had left Pittsburgh and settled in West
Chester, Pennsylvania – about 25 miles from Philadelphia. For a while, I continued to subscribe to the
digital edition of the Post-Gazette, to which I added digital editions
of the Washington Post and the New York Times. But I missed the feel and the smell of
newsprint – the ink stains on my fingertips – the sound the paper made as I
flipped from page to page.
West Chester has a small paper called The Daily
Local. I bought a digital
subscription to see if it had enough substance to warrant buying a print
subscription. It did not. That left the Philadelphia Inquirer. I purchased Sunday editions on a number of
occasions to see if I liked it. I determined
it was a serious newspaper, but the Sports section? No news of the Pirates, hardly a mention of
the Steelers, and the Penguins only came up when they played the Philadelphia
Flyers. Nevertheless, when I showed my
wife a special price for which we could get both print and digital editions of
the Inquirer, she offered to get it as a Christmas present for me.
* “A Day in the
Life,” John Lennon and Paul McCartney
