My grandparents subscribed to the Lexington Herald-Leader, which was not much of a newspaper before the Knight-Ridder purchase, but as a child I read the comics. My parents subscribed to the Kentucky edition of The Cincinnati Enquirer, and when I was in the seventh grade, my teacher, Ronnie Fern, had us pick a newspaper article each day and write something about it; from that I date my newspaper habit.
In the summers of 1968 to 1973, when I worked for the Flemingsburg Gazette, I read the Louisville Courier-Journal every morning at work and got to see what a fine newspaper was like. In college at Michigan State I was preoccupied with things apart from newspapering, and in graduate school at Syracuse I once subscribed briefly to the afternoon Herald-Journal and dropped it over the dumbest editorials I had ever seen.
But in 1980 a series of chances brought me to the copy desk of The Cincinnati Enquirer, where I found that I liked copy editing and was good at it; it was the discovery of what I was meant to do. And it was the start of a forty-five year habit of mornings with coffee and a daily newspaper; the national news, the foreign news, the local news, the editorials and op-eds, the features, the comics. Yes, there were other sources of news and entertainment, but the morning newspaper was the fixed spot of daily orientation. And yes, Boomer that I am, I was characteristic of my demographic; we all had the newspaper habit.
No more, I think. My colleague Steve Auerweck, once joked darkly that we should replace the "Obituaries" logo with "Subscriber Countdown." And indeed, for decades God has been harvesting the print readership. Still on this side of the turf, I finally dropped my subscription to The Baltimore Sun two and a half weeks ago because its new owner has fatally compromised what was left of its integrity.
Now, each morning, I make a pot of coffee for my wife and me and settle into a new routine. First The Guardian for world and and national news, then The Baltimore Banner for local and state news, then a series of online sites offering news and commentary. There is no longer a single fixed starting point, though I discover that I do not miss The Sun, which became a source of irritation and regret.
But I do miss the comics.
