As I was walking down the mountain that is Cal State Long Beach a couple of weeks ago, I saw a table near the University Bookstore with a Long Beach Press-Telegram banner and a stack of newspapers.
Wanting one, I stopped and asked an elderly man if they were free. It happened to be that he was trying to get people to sign onto the newspaper’s delivery list.
He got me. For some reason I saw the folded roll of papers and wanted to find out what it was about.
You see, even though I’m a journalism student I don’t read newspapers. I read news via online sources — some newspaper based — but I don’t actually sit and read a physical print news publication.
So, I signed up and headed to my car to get something to eat. Once stalled in a fast food drive-through, I began to read the freebie newspaper. The first article was a front-page story about car companies having to rent lots from the Port of Long Beach to store cars they couldn’t sell.
“Hmm,” I thought. “This isn’t the typical news you hear about from MSNBC, the Los Angeles Times or even The New York Times websites.”
I read some more and my experience was the same: a story about a man on trial for murdering a Long Beach woman, another about a former Long Beach museum director who settled his lawsuit against the museum’s foundation for defamation, an article about a fight in the city council over whether or not to hire more park rangers for El Dorado Park in light of the city’s budget problems.
Those stories had one thing in common — they were local.
I know a lot of people in college newsrooms don’t like that their paper focuses only on campus news; they want more reporting on bigger stories.
Yet, the big news media covers those stories so much that they lose their value. Meanwhile, the interesting and civically helpful local stories often go unnoticed either for a lack of quality reporting, the reader being overloaded by big news stories, or both.
“Those local articles can just go online,” replies the newspaper skeptic. “What more did this Press-Telegram edition offer?”
My answer: Long Beach.
While there should’ve been more feature articles on individuals in Long Beach, I felt like I had embraced the city by learning about a variety of things going on: economic, criminal, judicial and political. It was like being put into the middle of a moving Times Square-type crowd and becoming a living part of it.
In contrast, a news website just has you reading an article or two that seems interesting and that’s it. You don’t get the experience of learning about a variety of information, enjoying a newspaper layout, or becoming an actual component of the city that reading through a newspaper gives you.
The local newspaper is much more than just a gathering place for articles; it’s a community publication that we may be sorry about when it’s gone.
Brian Cuaron is a senior English major and an assistant city editor for the Daily Forty-Niner.