Newspapers have been with us for such a long time

I anticipate with regret and concern the passing of the real, physical daily newspaper with the sound of rustling paper, the dry smell of newsprint, the yellowing and then crumbling of old articles cut from a paper months and years before. With the ever greater decline of original content, the costs in comparison to a free display on the computer and with the disconsonant weltanschaung of most papers, their demise does seem only a matter of time and I hate to see their passing. I hope that I am wrong and that technology and desparation will lead to better content that people are willing to pay for.

All this brought to mind by Richard Henry Dana's comment in Two Years Before the Mast. Having departed from his Boston home, family, and studies at Harvard, he has been abroad in California for a year and half when mail and papers are delivered. He first observes:

After all, there is nothing in a strange land like a newspaper from home. Even a letter, in many respects, is nothing, in comparison with it. It carries you back to the spot, better than anything else. It is almost equal to clairvoyance.

He then goes on to tease out just how it achieves that transportation.

The names of the streets, with the things advertised, are almost as good as seeing the signs; and while reading "Boy lost!" one can almost hear the bell and well-known voice of "Old Wilson," crying the boy as "strayed, stolen, or mislaid!" Then there was the Commencement at Cambridge, and the full account of the exercises at the graduating of my own class. A list of all those familiar names, (beginning as usual with Abbot, and ending with W., ) which, as I read them over, one by one, brought up their faces and characters as I had known them in the various scenes of college life. Then I imagined them upon the stage, speaking their orations, dissertations, colloquies, etc. , with the gestures and tones of each, and tried to fancy the manner in which each would handle his subject, ----, handsome, showy, and superficial; ----, with his strong head, clear brain, cool self-possession; ----, modest, sensitive, and underrated; ----, the mouth-piece of the debating clubs, noisy, vaporous, and democratic; and so following. Then I could see them receiving their A. Bs. from the dignified, feudal-looking President, with his "auctoritate mihi commissa," and walking off the stage with their diplomas in their hands; while upon the very same day, their classmate was walking up and down California beach with a hide upon his head.