Monday, August 14, 2017

Drop Cloths, Boot Driers and All the News that's Fit to Print



Like most Alaskan’s I spent a lot of time this month processing fish.  I was preparing salmon for the smoker and laying the pieces of ripe orange filet on racks to dry before smoking. When I was laying out the newspaper under the wire racks, I got to thinking how useful newspaper was and how much a part of day-to-day life this daily-delivered paper product is.

 If I didn’t have yesterday’s paper what would I do for something absorbent to catch the drips of drying salmon? Is there anything cheaper, easier, or more disposable for catching drips than newspaper? What would one put under the paint can when painting the trim in the bathroom?  What is handier than grabbing some newspaper to stuff in those wet Xtratuf boots? I was actually going to take a stack to the recycler the other day and my wife stopped me, thank goodness. Any I don’t use, she’ll spread in the garden for weed block.

But with so many people reading their news online and newspapers struggling to sell print editions that could all be gone sooner than later.  All the time I was processing fish this weekend I chewed on this idea. What a bummer if I couldn’t grab the funny papers and classifieds out of the Sunday edition so I could have crossword puzzles to take in my pack when I travel. What if I wanted leave a story on the end table to share with my wife? How weird would it be not to have newspaper to start the fire in the woodstove or to wrap grandma’s china cups?
Oh we have paper towels and packing paper, puzzle apps on our phones and plenty of little waxed paper fire starters available, but are we ready to give that all up?

These ideas were all insignificant musing of a man longing the good old days of newspaper hats and my mom cleaning mirrors with a page out of the Sunday Daily News until this Friday.  This Friday, I was my cabin on Pear Lake and heard on KTNA that the Alaska Dispatch News was declaring bankruptcy and maybe being evicted. Suddenly, my old man fretting had become an actually possibility. Here was a real likelihood that a daily paper in Alaska’s largest city would be a thing of the past. Not in five years or ten years but right damn now! 

Suddenly this is more than the possibility that I have to pay for my drop cloths and blotters from now on. This is the real threat that we don’t have a print media source a center of record for our state.  If we loose the ADN it will be like closing a road, or shutting the doors of a school. Yes, we have good local and regional papers, but ADN was the statewide paper, and they still used that soft absorbent newsprint so handy around the house. I mean really, do we want Facebook and Twitter to be the table around which all our statewide conversation takes place? Will the “cloud” be the answer?

It’s not that Alaska Dispatch News is the perfect, unbiased news base. The point is that we need something to fill that gap for news and continuity of our Alaska community until a strong, valid twenty-first century solution is developed. I can find old ragged T shirts for drop clothes and be more frugal with saving birch bark for fire starters, but I’m not yet ready to give up having a rolled up newspaper landing in my drive, even if it does land in a puddle now and then.  Right now I’m going to teach my grandkids to make newspaper hats before it’s too late.