What We Lose When We Stop Turning Pages

The Fall of the Printed Press and the Need to Preserve It

There is a dear memory from my childhood that I treasure. Until I was thirteen, my family and I used to go to an Italian seaside town and spend the day at the beach. We would always do two things at the very beginning of the day: get some focaccia bread from the local bakery and go and buy newspapers. I would get Mickey Mouse’s News and watch my parents buy their paper and read it on a sunbed from beginning to end. It usually took them a long time, and I would grow restless, but they seemed to enjoy moving from one page to the next with all the calm in the world.

Another memory is my dad on Sunday mornings, reading his newspaper on the sofa and then passing it to my mum, pointing out articles he particularly liked. “You should read this. I don’t know if I agree with the journalist’s interpretation of current affairs,” or, “Did you know they discovered a new mummy at the Egyptian Museum?” The newspaper, in its physicality, was a moment to stop and reflect. A moment of stillness to take in new information, an object shared, a way to spark discussion.

Still, as a child, I was a bit confused as to why my parents liked the newspaper so much. “If you want to know what’s happening you could just watch the news on TV,” I scoffed. They explained to me that it was not the same. Television can keep you informed, that’s true, and nowadays a post on the internet can too, but what it lacks is commentary. This is the type of reflection, cultural interpretation and opinion that only an article can give you. There is a difference between keeping yourself up to date and truly understanding what is going on, and even more so, truly reflecting on it.

I learned to like reading newspapers myself. Through the pre-teen magazines I bought, I would learn how to make soap at home, take a quiz on which member of One Direction would be my boyfriend (Zayn), or discover that there was a Harry Potter Studio Tour in London when I was eleven. I even convinced my mum to take me there later on and we had a really nice day drinking butterbeer. I never really knew what I would find in a newspaper. I would just read it with the same curiosity I’d have for novels, discovering new things, being exposed to comments and ideas that had not really crossed my mind before.

I still read articles now, but it is different. Most of the news I access is through my phone, which means that, even if I read important newspapers such as The Guardian or The New York Times, it is extremely easy for me to filter the news according to what interests me and discard the rest. What emerges is an extremely distorted view of the world, where book and film reviews seem to be at the centre and little space is left for much else. I think this is the fundamental difference between newspapers and online reading. Reading a newspaper from the beginning to the end leads to a 360-degree exposure to knowledge, something that is now missing from our perfectly curated feeds.

Nowadays, reading the newspaper almost feels like an anachronistic gesture. Everything is filtered, accelerated; online articles even predict how many minutes it will take you to read them. It makes me reflect on how, despite thinking I am perfectly up to date on everything, I often lack an overall vision and don’t have the taste for curated, cohesive, well-crafted information, but instead for the fragments that fill the scraps of my time. I have started to buy a newspaper every week and I get bored. It feels too long and too time-consuming an activity, but I try to force myself through it. I try to get different editions each week, to understand what their political orientation is and what current of thought the editorial team has decided to take for that issue. It gives me lots to think about. 

When The Saint comes out, I have the tradition of reading it on the ground floor of the library. If a friend sits next to me, I often pass it to them and say, pointing at an article, “I think you should read this one.”

Illustration by Veronika Sullivan