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.
