We had a rare driveway-news moment here on Sunday morning when my son, Teddy, ran out in his pajama shorts to fetch The New York Times immediately upon waking. With the sleep still in his eyes, he pulled the paper out of the blue plastic delivery baggie and, still standing in the yard, tossed to me the front section and the magazine to unveil the section he was urgently seeking. And there he was on the front cover of Sunday Styles, along with his friends Billy and Harry, in a huge, page-filling photo that heralded a huge, laudatory, charming feature on page four by a Times reporter named Callie Holtermann. “Print Is Dead? Don’t Tell These 15-Year-Olds” was the headline. The boys’ summer newspaper, The Ditch Weekly, was the subject.
And I mention this knowing full well that most of you are already aware that my son, Teddy, was in The New York Times — because, as a proud mother among a coterie of other Ditch Weekly moms around town this week, my buttons are bursting and I have told everyone I’ve ever met, and many I’ve never met, that my son was in a gigantic feature in The Gray Lady, pressing this exciting information on the checker at the I.G.A., classmates from 1984, and cousins on the West Coast I haven’t see in a decade. The Sunday Styles section story was published early online on the Times website on Friday morning, and by noon Friday I had rented a Cessna to drag a flying banner (“Did You See Teddy in The Times?”) over Indian Wells and Asparagus Beach, lest anyone fail to realize I’m raising a genius.
It’s been an interesting spring in family newspapering. First came the unofficial conclave of the old-time Star reporters who convened at Ashawagh Hall in April to honor my late mother and talk about the freedom of the press, about semicolons, and the year when “Mrs.” was given a feminist alternate, “Ms.” Now, her grandchildren are causing a heartwarming sensation in the reader-comments section of the world’s most influential newspaper as champions of journalism.
I actually beg to differ with the implications of The Times’s headline writer, as cockle-warming as the message was. I do think print is dead. I mean, all paper news products won’t vanish from the face of the earth, obviously; there will always be print fans, stans, and clingers to the past who demand the morning delivery of their favorite broadsheets and tabloids in physical form, much in the same way that there will always be horses scattered here and there, standing around in stables and paddocks wondering where the other horses went. There will be horses, but fewer, and they will be ridden by a demographically minuscule cohort of enthusiasts (who will be found, as ever, buying sourdough at the Sagaponack General Store in boots and jodhpurs, despite the arrival of the combustion engine and the unstoppable onrush of the automobile).
I know exactly the day I last had a driveway-pajamas-news moment of any importance or impact. It was Sunday, Aug. 31, 1997. “Diana Killed in Car Accident in Paris,” read the headline. I was barefoot, and walking carefully over the painful stones in our driveway on Cranberry Hole Road in Amagansett, and it took me a beat before I could understand what The Times was saying. The Princess of Wales was dead, and so was Dodi Fayed. As someone who has devoured every word of news and gossip about Windsor and Co. since I was about 13 years old, scraping the jar and licking the jam from my fingers, this was a thunderclap.
We did already have email and the internet by 1997, but we accessed it on our big desktop machines, and while some of us kept these big computer boxes at home, most of our internet-accessing happened at the office. This was a Sunday. My office was in Manhattan that year, at the Hachette-Filipacchi building on Broadway, with a window looking out on the Winter Garden Theatre. The death of Diana came a year before Google replaced Altavista and Ask Jeeves and 12 years before 2009, when iPhones came in. I can remember the Times headline, and my momentary confusion, and the stones hurting my feet as I walked back to the house. The death of Diana is the last big news of my lifetime that came via print. How strange it is that it was only four years later, in 2001, that I was refreshing my browser, clicking and clicking and clicking futilely and compulsively several times a day, to see if they’d caught Osama bin Laden yet. I was a New Yorker then. I clicked and refreshed Google News for nine years.
One surprise that was waiting for the three young newspapermen who founded The Ditch Weekly last summer is that in going into the newspaper business they had gone into manufacturing. I mean, they knew they were making a product, a thing, an item to be held in hand, obviously, but before the debut issue it was easy for these digital natives to sort of forget that hundreds of pounds of that thing were going to arrive by truck and be dropped with a thunderous thud on the gravel behind The East Hampton Star building before dawn each Thursday for 10 weeks. It requires some hefting. (And on a tangential note, it seems to me that having now successfully launched themselves into manufacturing, these kids could do a lucrative side business selling Ditch Weekly ball caps and newspaper delivery bags. I’d wear that hat; wouldn’t you?)
Modernity is reductive. The multiplicity is replaced with the monoculture. That is the tide of history on the grander scale. There used to be a whole staff of Bonacker men with industrial knowledge and specialized skills who did all the work of physically producing the newspaper: a compositor setting the type, a man running a linotype machine, a press operator who kept the hulking beast that lived in the back room happy and running smoothly, an adolescent printer’s devil learning the ropes with ink on his hands, and a fleet of newsboys who carried the week’s important information into the front yards and driveways of the townspeople. My father once told me that as a boy one of his arms, I think his right, was longer than the other because his shoulder was weighted down by having spent his childhood and adolescence, as his bones developed, carrying a heavy newspaper delivery bag slung across his body.
I don’t need to tell you — you who are holding this physical product in your hands as you read this column — that democracy needs ethical newspaper people more than ever. May there always be horses and may there always be kids who want to wear a fedora with a “press” card tucked into the hatband.