Getting Back in Touch: On News and Papers
7AM, SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER. Having flown back to the UK in time for the weekend, my holiday is over — but the sweet spot is I’ve flown back for days where no one expects much of me anyway, so I take advantage by getting up early and having a couple of languid mornings. I bulldoze my way through three episodes of the BBC’s ‘Bodyguard’, which started while I was away, I take a bath, I make copious amounts of tea and coffee. And I do what I’ve been dying to for two months out of the country: I get the weekend papers.
Because I have been gone for so long, and because I am staying with my parents in the Home Counties for two weeks while I move cities for my MA, I make an errand of it by taking longest route possible and following it in a circle. At the midway point, I drop into the newsagents and reach for the last copy of The Times just as another woman does. Being painfully English, I let her have it. With my idealism thwarted, I backtrack into a Tesco Express, and pick it up alongside The Telegraph.
Carrying the two home is a joy. Having not been flush enough to maintain my subscriptions over the last two months — I left my job to travel — my news intake has been contained to my twitter feed, and that has its own pros and cons. Whether I am conscious of it or not, taking in news on Twitter is a demanding process: FT Brexit reports jostle with Supernanny memes, reading about the Venice Biennal often happens by way of film stan wit, and Atlantic think-pieces are succeeded by heated and often poorly executed threads. News on Twitter is twined, always, with opinion, because Twitter is a community platform predicated on sharing and, by extension, gossip. If I see news on Twitter it is because it has already been deemed newsworthy in a very particular sense: worth retweeting, liking, passing around. News on Twitter is juicy, with a shocked J. Alexander America’s Next Top Model GIF attached. And because I am somewhere between a millennial and Gen Z, it’s not all bad: receiving my news like this means my intake is as balanced as it could possibly be — I’m as likely to come across a breakdown of misogynoir via the prejudice against two black women at this year’s US Open Final as I am an alt-right rant. But taking in news on Twitter also takes its toll: on notions of empathy, on the value one places on physical and cerebral labour, on how one accrues facts, and assimilates that information into their daily life. When my arm begins to hurt carrying the heft of Sunday papers home, I am glad. It’s a valid reminder of the effort I don’t see behind them: of journalists, printers, delivery men. It’s what I was reminded of every time I inevitably hit a paywall after passing my ‘10-free-articles-a-month’ limit a day into each one I was away.
It doesn’t take a purist to note a difference between reading the papers and reading via Twitter. The process isn’t necessarily better or worse, it’s just different — but since print is in decline I will make the case for reading the papers, because it does me a kind of good I’ve missed during my couple of months away. Empathy works differently in print, where reading is a slowed process, laid out in sections over several pages. My thumb tends to scroll faster than my eyes read, and no one, not even Mother Theresa, has the emotional acuity to swing between humour and rage in .5 seconds when videos of the PM dancing sit immediately next to Grenfell inquiry reports. In contrast to the barrage of a social media feed, what print allows for is time and space: the ability to read and react to an article in one distinct space, and then turn the page and move on clearly to another.
The true value of those things is that reading print is (usually) a solitary process, where news comes without user opinion attached, or else clearly marked as Op-Ed. No newspaper is truly neutral or bipartisan (nor should they be, that’s what Reuters is for), but what a relief, after two months, to read first with my own voice in my head before navigating other people’s view of reality. What a relief to be informed simply in black and white before I add colour with my own mind! News cycles are not exhausting by their nature; reading them should not be a chore. If what Twitter has done by interconnecting us so thoroughly is give us a heightened awareness of our social responsibility, it has come, paradoxically, at the expense of valuing the individual, and a moment of hush to decide what one thinks.
But I am lying if I don’t mention the sentimental. Memory kicks in when you do something you haven’t for a long time, and I found myself thinking over people I’d smiled at whilst they folded their broadsheet in half. Peers in the process of starting new platforms or publications; bookseller colleagues two or three decades older than me; friends making their way as lawyers, actors, critics. I think I’m not alone in feeling the palatable pleasure of splitting a paper and rifling over to the section you want. My mother took the piss out of me yesterday whilst I read The Saturday Review with audible satisfaction. “Who would have thought something as simple as The Times would give you this much joy?” I don’t think there’s anything simple about it, but it’s a helluva way to come back home.
