Broadly Speaking

Image: genevalunch.com

It’s been some time since I handled a real paper version of a newspaper. I read a lot of news but all of it online. It has been an even longer time since I tackled a broadsheet. One entered our house the other day, though, so I thought I’d give it a go.

Whose daft idea were broadsheets? I think they were handed down by an alien race whose finger-spread is at least 20 inches. They are certainly not designed for humans. Every time I try to hold one up to read it, I feel as though I’m about to go windsurfing. If I wanted to feel so utterly inept in the presence of large sheets of paper, I would attempt to wallpaper my living room.

The only way to handle these standing up is to do the multi-fold thing, where you spot a story and then fold the newspaper down to size so you only have a reading surface the size of a paperback novel. Not great on a train where the necessarily flamboyant folding motions usually cause the odd nosebleed in your fellow passengers.

Laying them flat on a table is not much use either. Personally, I need to swap between binoculars, the naked eye, and reading glasses just to scan one page. A chair on casters also helps. Or you start with most of it scrunched up in your lap, then slowly pull it onto the table as you peruse it.

Broadsheets aside, and the Amazon Rain Forest notwithstanding (literally), the excellent thing about hardcopy newspapers is that you cannot suddenly get sidetracked into looking at anything else. You have the news inside the newspaper and that’s it. There are no interesting links to click on. How many times does one web page lead to countless others until you forget where you started? With paper news, your only option if you want to “surf” anything else is to sidle up to another person and read what they’re reading over their shoulder.

There was an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal the other day on how the web’s information overload has made it “difficult for mass audiences to rub up against the news—even if accidentally.” Without a newspaper editor deciding on our behalf what’s truly newsworthy, our search for news can lose focus.

News-gathering on the web is a very different animal. I can attest to that. In my job, I am my own editor. I have to be. Searching for news on one particular company may produce 20 pages on Google News, from which I may pull out only 2 stories. The rest is usually guff, mostly irrelevant mentions and regurgitated “news” that ceased to be news days or even weeks before.

For the freelance writer, the news is good. The web has increased your opportunities exponentially. You may have less “real” writing jobs to aim at as newspapers die and established publishers lose business to self-publishing on Amazon (the business not the forest) and elsewhere, but, apart from that, you can pretty much write your own ticket.