The Death Knell of The Roanoke Times

My husband's howl of frustration early yesterday morning had me out of my office chair and racing toward the kitchen.

"They did away with the comics. We won't be renewing our subscription," he announced as I turned the corner from the hall into the great room.

With that, our mutual 39-year love affair with The Roanoke Times will soon be at an end. Our subscription is up for renewal in about a month.

From the looks of it, we won't be getting a daily newspaper for the first time in our long marriage. And I, who have been reading the paper daily at least for the last 55 years, won't have that bit of information and entertainment to preoccupy me at breakfast, lunch, or dinner.

I always did like to read the paper with a meal.

The Roanoke Times and I go back a long way. I remember sitting at my grandparents' kitchen table, reading the front page, when I was five. I overheard my grandfather asking my grandma what I was doing, pretending to read the paper. I promptly began reading it aloud to him. My grandmother assured Grandpa that I didn't really understand what I was reading, I just knew the words.

She was wrong. And right. I was five, so of course I couldn't really understand the headlines of war in Vietnam, the numbers about budgets, the discussions of race, the talk of hippies. But I began to understand, and I suspect I understood more than the adults around me thought.

One of the first things my husband and I did after we married was obtain a subscription to The Roanoke Times & World News, as it was called then. We received the afternoon edition, which ended eventually and in 1995 the paper changed its name to The Roanoke Times and only put out a single daily edition.

I wrote for The Roanoke Times & World News for a while, freelancing for what they then called "The Neighbors" section. This was a pull-out magazine type of news with feature stories about various areas in it. I also covered graduations and occasionally ball games, calling those stories in "old school" - from the floor of a payphone at the Salem Civic Center or the high school. I'd sit in the little booth, glancing at my notes and making the story up in my head. I repeated it on the phone to Charlie Stebbins, who taught me to say things like "end graph" and "sub headline" or whatever the story called for, while I was quickly scanning my scribbles about pomp and circumstance or jump shots, composing in my brain. It had to be done then in order for the story to make the morning paper.

There were no delays.

This was in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I think. I did it for a few years, off and on.

I daresay few young writers today will ever have that experience, not with their laptops at the ready and the Internet satellites beaming their words instantaneously to the news editor's desk. They won't know what it is like to work with someone else to get a story out, not like that, anyway.

So, I have watched the decline of The Roanoke Times with dismay. It echoes what's going on around the nation, and I suppose the world. The younger generation turns to Instagram and social influencers for their news. They don't know the joy of reading a long, well-written and thoroughly researched article. They listen to podcasts to form their opinions, and we've created a vast echo chamber for one another. We can select to listen to only those folks we agree with. (And let's not forget to mention where the news actually comes from - newspapers like the dying Roanoke Times.)

At least in The Roanoke Times, which is not, as some people claim, a "liberal rag," there was a variety of opinions in the op-ed pages. Reporters' opinions were generally left outside of the story, though as the times changed and opinion reporting became more the norm in TV outlets, objective journalism began to fall by the wayside.

I still see good journalism, but most people, I have learned, read a story and only see what they want to agree with anyway, whether the story actually says what they think it says or not. Or at least that was my experience with the thousands of articles I wrote, because the Republicans thought I was one of theirs, and the Democrats thought I was one of theirs, and for decades I never said anything about which tribe I belonged to, and even today, when many people would label me a Democrat, I reject the label more and more, because there's not really a party out there that represents me. I am no one's huckleberry.

The Roanoke Times used to come to us on Sunday fat as a hog that was overfed the previous day, ads bursting from it, with articles from local reporters who busted their ass to investigate, and investigate thoroughly, the issue of the day. Some of those articles could be quite long, running on for pages.

I read them with relish.

But the advertising declined, and the paper thinned. Old reporters retired and were not replaced. Now, others have been forced out, and others still have jumped from what is obviously a nearly sunken ship.

The paper is attempting to go completely digital. Alienating those of us who still prefer paper is the way to do that, apparently, given the recent changes to the print edition. More and more, they want us to use our smart phones and hit the QR code (which is something I can barely manage, so I shudder to think what the older folks do) and visit the website.

There's something glorious about reading a paper, a thrill that I do not get reading the same thing on a computer screen. It's similar to holding a paperback instead of my Kindle; it's really not the same experience. It's also not an experience that folks under 30 comprehend, given a conversation I had today with a young friend who doesn't understand the allure of getting a little black ink on your hands while you are eating your chicken salad sandwich at lunch.

A newspaper is a work of art, full of other art forms. The advertisements could be an art, the comics are art - the writing frequently was (and sometimes still is) of the level of art. The newspapers I remember - not the skinny little things of today - were feasts of delight that had a little something in it for everyone, a virtual potluck of information and entertainment unmatched by anything else available.

And to think that the owners - hedge fund operators, really - have let this artform languish to the point of death is ghastly and appalling. To know that it is because of the almighty dollar bill is gut-wrenching.

To think that it was likely inevitable is the most depressing thought I will have today.

Thanks for the good times, The Roanoke Times. I salute what you once were and mourn what you have become.