Are there are any newsboys left? Is there somewhere that a kid still stands around hawking the latest headlines? Face it, newspapers are just about a thing of the past and that just makes me sad. With the loss of the daily delivery the paper routes of the past with a kid on a bike flinging papers willy nilly at houses is also but a blip in history. I think most papers are delivered in the early morning hours by someone in an old VW or Toyota with the driver's side window permanently down.
If newspapers cease publishing actual hard copy I think it will be a terrible loss. I'm old school. I like holding the paper, sitting on the floor with it spread out in front of me, folding it up to read one article more intimately. And I love cutting things out of the paper that catch my eye and stuffing them away with hope that sometime in the future I'll find them again and not have to ask myself, "Why they heck did I save this?" I have newspaper clippings going back decades. I've even got interesting obituaries of ordinary people who had extraordinary obituaries. It's not the same when it's digital.
A digital newspaper is more about advertising in your face than a hard copy paper. You tend to just scan for the items that interest you, clicking on links that rush you past things you don't care about. Seriously, does anyone peruse the obits in a digital newspaper? I'm guessing that only people looking for a specific obit ever look at them.
And making a pdf of an article and sticking it into a folder made of ones and zeros just doesn't cut it. It never yellows with age and if you trash it you can't go back later and see it laying in the trash allowing you to think, "Well, maybe I'll keep this for awhile."
This weeks
Sepia Saturday, a haunt I've had to forgo for the past months, has a photo of three gents in suits with the center guy holding some papers. It immediately made me think of this shot taken from the collection of photos I purchased at the Betty Schnabel estate sale last year. The fellow on the left is her father, who I think might have worked in some capacity in the oil industry. I have no information about the newsboy or the fellow on the right. I'm guessing that's a train station in the background in Rawlins, Wyoming.
Click on image to see it larger.
What is it about the newsboy that seems to fascinate or annoy Betty's dad? The other guy seems to have bought a paper and is happy to have his photo taken with the kid. But why take your picture with the newsboy? Why was this shot taken? Okay, I really don't want you to waste any time or brain cells on this question, it's just something that occurred to me.
As far as my headline/title of this post...these days most of what gets "published" online isn't worth the ones and zeros it's "printed" on.
This is my submission to Sepia Saturday.
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