“I tend to read the newspaper with scissors,” my mom remarked just now as we talked about the benefits of reading through the paper to see what’s happening in the community.
My parents are pros when it comes to reading the paper, but I realize that I’m very much an internet kid. I read an article in the paper and find that I miss the reader commentary at the bottom. I get cynical about the corporate ownership of much of Canada’s news media by Canwest. I feel like social media can give me my news and keep me in touch with the community because it’s created and shared collaboratively.
But somehow whenever I talk to my parents, who live on Vancouver island, they seem to know more about what’s happening in Vancouver than I do. As troubled as the news industry is, we rely on the paper as a common ground for information and community involvement. For my mom, the benefit of finding something new and spontaneous in the paper often outweighs the ability to point and click through websites of her own choosing.
Every kind of document is made for a specific purpose. There are ways of reading the paper that I just never thought about. I’m going to start reading with scissors and see where it leads me.
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Sometimes on my way to SLAIS I am torn between whether I should pick up a free newspaper, or if I can rely on the news headlines I have read in my RSS feed that morning, and instead choose to listen to music. Usually when I read the paper I get so much more out of it than just the top stories. There are always other bits of interesting information, such as letters submitted by the public, editorials that really have little importance in the grand scheme of things, and a recipe I might try one day. However, as students we are typically so short on time that a quick read through of our favourite websites that cover all the bases so we know what is going on in the world, is often all we can fit into our schedules. But I have to say, there is still nothing like drinking a good cup of coffee and browsing through a Vancouver Sun. Browsing news sites on the internet just doesn’t have the same nostalgia for me.
Just curious – what does your mum do with all her clippings? (I hope she’s not sending ransom notes!)
I live in a unique little community, so whenever there was a newspaper article about living on Indian Arm I always used to clip it out and I’ve pasted them into a scrapbook. Sometimes I’ve missed the article and heard about it later, so I’ve printed it off the web and included it, but it’s just not the same.
Heh, my parents are the same. My dad mails me articles from the NY Times or the Oregonian on a regular basis. Sometimes it’ll be an article that someone else has already emailed me, or that I’ve found myself online, but there is something touching about having the physical item.
haha, fortunately I can confirm that there are no ransom notes. I think the main reason for cutting out the articles is just for future reference. She’ll see something that’s interesting and save it to catch up on later. She has also cut out articles to share with people when she thinks they might be interested.