As it's Father's Day, I was thinking not only about my father, Roger (happy day, Dad), but also my grandfathers, Dean Dunham and Raymond Richardson, both of whom I miss more with every passing year. If there is/was a love and practice that all four of us share/shared, it is that of reading the newspaper.
For me, it all started when I was a kid with The Pike Press and the Quincy Herald-Whig. Later in high school, we added the Jacksonville Journal-Courier for more local sports coverage.
When I went to college, I read The Maneater (the twice-weekly student-produced rag) and The Columbia Missourian (which was also student-produced on a daily basis, but with professorial oversight). I also purchased a subscription to The Christian Science Monitor as a requirement for a political science class that I kept until graduating.
When I moved to Colorado Springs, I lived with a family the first nine months and read the Colorado Springs Gazette, but later subscribed to The Denver Post because it carried more national and international news. In the months during those years when I was recording in Chicago, I marveled that my cousin Alan (with whom I stayed) got both the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times (the Sunday editions alone would take all week to read, which I happily did).
When we relocated back to the Midwest, we purchased a daily subscription to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and I also read the free weekly independent, The Riverfront Times. We later subscribed to the The Oklahoman during the four years we lived in Oklahoma City, and I read The Tulsa World whenever we visited Megan's parents in Owasso.
For the past five years in Bozeman, we've subscribed to the Bozeman Daily Chronicle (also called The Daily Comical by my conservative friends), and this week began my first subscription to The Wall Street Journal, which is wonderful.
Of course, it's easy to read newspapers online and I do—The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Washington Examiner, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times—but it’s usually only for a particular linked article or editorial that catches my eye while surfing. Given my druthers, I prefer the daily, habitual practice of receiving the day's news on my front porch and watching for resultant reports and conversations pertaining to it in the days and weeks to follow. Sometimes I'll even contribute a Letter to the Editor, which I've done three or four times here in Bozeman, all of which have been printed.
Going back to my father and grandfathers, if there is/was one thing true about each of them, it is/was that they are/were generally well-informed men regarding the world and the times in which they live/lived. That lesson has always stuck with me and borne fruit in my approach to life.
While there's such a thing as reading too much news (particularly if it’s all from the same perspective and bias), let me encourage my fellow fathers to make it a practice to engage beyond the television and Internet sound bites. If you don't subscribe to a newspaper, pick one and try it! Invest in a medium that has historically lent itself to not only reporting but shaping the events in our world. Who knows? Maybe after a while, you'll consider adding your own voice to the conversation in this most constructive way.
(Note: If you do subscribe, don't worry about all the paper—recycle! The cost is cheap, and it's great for your kids to see you reading a physical paper, especially when you get to teach them how to read something that’s non-clickable.)