Sure, the newspaper reported. But as it fades, those who use it for other things must also adjust

The sun would rise over the Rockies, and Robin Gammons would run to the front porch to grab the morning paper before school.

She wanted comics and her father wanted sports, but the Montana Standard meant more than “Calvin and Hobbes” or their daily run to grab baseball scores. When one of the three kids made the honor roll, won a basketball game or wore a freshly killed bison for the history club, appearing in the pages of the Standard made the achievement feel more real. Robin became an artist with a one-woman show at a gallery downtown, and a front-page article even went on the fridge. Five years later, the yellow article is still there.

The Montana Standard reduced print circulation to three days a week two years ago, cutting printing costs like 1,200 other U.S. newspapers over the past two decades. At the same time, about 3,500 documents have been closed. This year there have been two closures per week on average.

That slow fade, it turns out, is about more than changing news habits. It speaks directly to the presence of the newspaper in our lives—not just in terms of the information printed in it, but in its identity as a physical object with many other uses.

“You can pass it on. You can keep it. And then, of course, there’s all the fun stuff,” says Diane DeBlois, one of the founders of the Ephemera Society of America, a group of scholars, researchers, dealers and collectors who focus on what they call “priceless primary source information.”

“Newspapers wrapped fish. They washed windows. They appeared in outhouses,” she says. “And – free toilet paper.”

The decline of the media business has changed American democracy over the past two decades — some think for the better, many think for the worse. What’s indisputable: The gradual decline of printed paper—the commodity that millions read to inform themselves and then reuse in the home’s workflow—has quietly changed the fabric of everyday life.

American Democracy and the Pet Cage

People used to hold onto the world, then save their precious memories, their floors and furniture, wrap presents, pet cages and light fires. In Butte, San Antonio, Texas, New Jersey and worldwide, life without printed paper is a little different.

For newspaper publishers, printing costs are extremely high in an industry under stress in an online society. For the common man, physical paper pay phones, cassette tapes, answering machines, bank checks, the sound of internal combustion engines and a woman’s ivory-white pair of gloves are linked as objects whose lost time passes.

“It’s so hard to see while it’s happening, so easy to see things like that in general hindsight,” says Marilyn Nissenson, author of “Going Going Gone: Vanishing Americana.” “Young women were going to work and they wore it for a while and then one day they looked at them and thought, ‘This is funny.’ It was a small but telling icon for a much larger social change.”

Nick Matthews thinks a lot about newspapers. Both his parents worked at the Pekin (Illinois) Daily Times. He became the sports editor of the Houston Chronicle and is now an adjunct professor at the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism.

“I have memories of my parents wrapping gifts using newspapers,” he says. “In my family, you always knew a gift was from my parents because it was wrapped.”

In Houston, he recalled recently, the Chronicle sold reliably when the Astros, Rockets or Texas won a championship because so many people wanted the paper as a gift.

Four years ago, Matthews interviewed 19 people in Caroline County, Virginia, in 2018 about the shuttering of the Caroline Progress, a 99-year-old weekly newspaper that closed months before its 100th anniversary.

In “Print Imprint: The Connection Between the Physical Newspaper and the Self,” published in the Journal of Communication Inquiry, wistful Virginians recall their high school portraits and their daughter’s wedding dress in progress. Also, one told Matthews, “My fingers are so much cleaner now. I feel miserable without ink stains.”

Many and varied uses

Flush with cash from Omahans who invested years ago with local guy Warren Buffett, the Nebraska Wildlife Rehab is a well-equipped center for migratory waterfowl, wading birds, reptiles, foxes, bobcats, coyotes, mink and beavers.

“We get over 8,000 animals every year and we use that newspaper for all of those animals,” says executive director Laura Stastny.

Getting old newspapers has never been a problem in this neighboring Midwestern town. Stasny is concerned about the electronic future, however.

She says, ‘We are doing well now. “If we lost that resource and had to use something else or buy something, that, with the options we have, would easily cost us more than $10,000 a year.”

That would be about 1% of the budget, Stastny says, but “I’ve never been in a position to be without them, so I might be surprised by a higher dollar figure.”

By 1974, the Omaha World-Herald printed a morning edition and two afternoon editions, including a late-afternoon Wall Street edition with closing prices.

“Afternoon major-league baseball was still the norm, so I had to understand both baseball and stock market statistics,” Buffett, 85, told the World-Herald in 2013, by which time he had become the world’s most famous investor and paper owner.

The World-Herald ended its second afternoon edition in 2016, and Buffett left the newspaper business five years ago. Fewer than 60,000 households receive a paper today, down from about 190,000 in 2005, or about one per household, according to Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

Time moves on

Few places symbolize the shift from print to digital more than Stockholm’s district of Akalla, where the ST01 data center sits on a site once occupied by Sweden’s main newspaper printing factory, Kaun says.

“They have fewer and fewer machines, and instead this co-location data center is taking up more and more of the building,” she says.

Data centers use huge amounts of energy, of course, and the environmental benefit of using less printing paper is offset by the huge popularity of online shopping.

“You’ll see a decline in printed papers, but a huge increase in packaging,” says Cecilia Alcoreza, manager of forest sector transformation for the World Wildlife Fund.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution announced in August that it would stop offering a print edition at the end of the year and go fully digital, making Atlanta the largest U.S. metro area without a print daily newspaper.

The habit of following the news—being informed about the world—cannot be separated from the existence of print, says Anne Kahn, professor of media and communication studies at Södertörn University in Stockholm.

Kaun said that children who grew up in homes with printed newspapers and magazines began to see the news randomly and there was a social transformation in news reading habits. With cell phones, this does not happen.

“I think it’s meaningfully changing how we relate to each other, how we relate to things like news. It’s reshaping attention and communication,” says Sarah Wasserman, a cultural critic and assistant dean at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire who specializes in changing forms of communication.

“These things will always exist in certain areas and certain pockets and certain class niches,” she says. “But I think they’re hiding.”