Maybe I just don’t understand millennials or know enough of them to have any idea what makes them tick.
They do get married, don’t they? They do have children, don’t they? Most children like things that are going to remind them of bygone days, right?
Then, tell me this: When these children are born, or start playing ball, or are elected to the Homecoming Court, or named to the cheerleading squad or school honor roll, or get married and have their own children, or so on and so forth, are they going to be able to print a copy of this news from Facebook, Instagram, email or any other social media devices to show the kid later on or to share with grandparents?
Please, because I want to know: How can this happen without a copy of the local newspaper to clip it from?
Practically all of my schoolmates grew up with a scrapbook or two of their best memories of childhood and adolescence, from birth to the youth group at church to little league box scores to their high school club to photos with their prize-winning cows or pigs at the county fair to pictures with the grands or Santa Claus.
The possibilities of such occurrences have no limit.
I wouldn’t take a million dollars for the scrapbooks full of newspaper clippings kept from my youth baseball experience. I was fortunate enough to play on two state-championship winning kid baseball teams. These books chart our course as 12- and 15-year-olds from opening day to the final out at the state tournament and beyond.
The local paper — in this case, the Enterprise-Journal — even ran batting averages of members of all the teams at mid-season. It mattered not whether you were batting .150 or .400. You think these lists aren’t priceless now to people who are 70-and-up?
I mention this rub because apparently, Millennials (people born in the ‘80s and ‘90s) do not read newspapers at all. That’s what the surveys show. They supposedly get most of their news from the various social media outlets.
This situation has caused newspapers from Maine to Mississippi to have to curtail some coverage, cut the number of times they publish each week or just flat close.
Perhaps this is a silly-sounding notion to them — this asking how they are going to keep up with not only their own lives but that of their children and grandchildren, enabling someone 50 and 60 years later to look back with pride through scrapbooks and the like at the successes of life.
Newspapers caused some of their own problems. I may be the only former employee of the newspaper world who thinks the industry went to hell in a handbasket the day papers stopped publishing little league box scores.
And then there was a revolution in the newspaper industry about 40 years ago when wholesale changes took place in newspaper design. There was a certain standard as to how papers “looked,” and most of them followed the latest fad. They worried more about the “look” than they did what readers wanted from their paper. I thought it was a crock. It never seemed to hurt the few papers who ignored the revolution.
Then came the period when reporters were directed to wrangle “real people” into saying something about an article or issue, even if they knew nothing on the subject. Each story had to have a real person’s angle on it, worthy or not. That was another crock.
I always go back to my basic question when discussing the trials and tribulations of the newspaper industry. I do not understand how these 20-and-30-somethings are going to keep records of their existences without being able to take scissors and clip articles and pictures from newspapers to preserve for posterity.
Whatever form of preservation is possible nowadays in this new age, I doubt it will have the authenticity of a newspaper page. The ink must flow.
Mac Gordon is a retired newspaperman. He is a part-time resident of McComb. He can be reached at macmarygordon @gmail.com.
