My A-Z of Reading: N is for Newspapers

I’ve always been fascinated by newspapers; I collect them: historical events and countries of the world. So if any of my readers are in a position to get me a newspaper from Mongolia or Greenland – in a local language – I’ll be very grateful, as these are gaps in my collection. Similarly, I’m open to offers for my copy of The New York Times (genuine) reporting the first manned moon landing…

Newspapers have been around for well over three centuries, and one of the things that interested me as a child was that my home town claimed the oldest local paper in the land, the Lincoln, Rutland and Stamford Mercury as it was then. I cringe at having been brought up reading the Daily Mail, a rag the country should genuinely be ashamed of. But at boarding school we were provided with The Guardian and The Times and it has been the former that I’ve stuck with all my life.

Newspapers were serious publications; I say were advisedly, for they have changed beyond all recognition in my lifetime. They used to be straightforward, black and white publications with perhaps sixteen to twenty broadsheet pages, containing news, sport, a couple of pages of comment and analysis, and different pages on different days reviewing concerts, books and the like. Today we have largely tabloid newspapers, in colour – often lurid – and several sections: far more paper, and far more froth and knitted words filling them. It often seems that any nonentity who can’t write a sentence can be a columnist. And all the lifestyle nonsense and celebrity stuff, even in the most serious of papers. The Daily Telegraph – known as the Morning Fascist to me (know your enemy) – used to be a serious newspaper of record in which one could ignore the rabid columnists and laugh oneself silly at the Peter Simple column. Now it is a shadow of its former self.

Television and the internet have happened, and newspapers in Britain don’t know what to do with themselves. The Germans have the answer, I feel: serious and sober, few concessions to the latest trends, it seems, and focusing on quality, in-depth reporting and analysis. Le Monde used to do this in France – a newspaper famous for not using any photographs at all back in the old days. But it has changed, and caught the British disease. And Liberation, which mocked everyone and everything, a newspaper for anarchists – look at it now! And the culture of local and regional dailies helps both France and Germany avoid most of the worst excesses of our gutter press.

Let’s be serious for a moment. I’m not buying a newspaper for news any more. News I get online. Even newspapers recognise this and go to print earlier and earlier in the evening. So what can a newspaper offer that the web and television can’t? In-depth reporting, and serious political and social analysis still reads better – to me, but am I just old? – in print. Articles about culture, books, education and music are plentiful online, but I like reading good writing in print. Do I need colour for this? Not very much, to be honest. And do I need a dose of this every day? Again, probably not. A decent newspaper could probably come out twice a week, just as some did a couple of centuries ago, or even weekly, which is what Sunday newspapers do, or in countries like France and Germany where the culture of the weekly news magazine is still strong, what magazines like L’Obs or Der Spiegel do.

Newspapers are wrestling with how to survive and make money in the internet age, but do not seem to be trying much that’s new. Where is micro-payment for articles, where are sensible and clear subscription options in Britain? I feel awkward – I won’t admit to more than that – reading so much stuff for nothing, and I block ads because newspapers farm out advertising to all sorts of weasels who spray malware in all directions. I’d pay for stuff if there was a sensible way and I knew what I was getting if I signed up to a subscription deal. I’ve tried several times to get The Guardian to tell me what exactly I would get for being a subscriber and they haven’t responded… so no money from me.

I can’t see newspapers actually disappearing – though I’d like the Sun and the Daily Mail to, and The Independent has vanished from print, but what will I be reading in ten years time?