Some people obsess over cell phones. I'm fascinated by newspaper racks.
I'm also worried.
It would be great to see every single one of the 4,000 copies of the University News disappear off the racks each week, but I can live with a few copies needing to be recycled.
But it kills me to see the vast quantities of The New York Times, The Kansas City Star and U.S.A. Today (offered for free) still sitting many evenings in the distribution bins spread around campus.
As someone involved quite a bit in the print business, the U-News is my present - those other papers are my future.
A few weeks ago, after the most recent round of layoffs and buyouts at the Star, KHSB Channel 41 interviewed both me and our U-News faculty adviser, Professor Fred Wickman on the future of newspapers and journalism students.
Neither of us had a magic-bullet solution.
If you've paid even a modicum amount of attention to how things are going in the newspaper business in this country, you'd know we're not alone.
But a solution must be found.
The closest I've come is in examining cultural habits in different countries.
Maybe it's an easy stereotype, but I've always thought of Japan as a country well-known for being early adapters of new technologies.
It's clearly a place where newspapers should be destined to die, as more and more people receive information on various electronic devices.
Yet the number one newspaper in the country (Asahi Shimbun) sells 12 million copies daily. That's more than the top nine papers in the United States combined.
Italy, a country a fifth the size of the United States, has not one, not two, but three widely-circulated national dailies dedicated entirely to sports.
La Gazzetta dello Sport (which covers almost exclusively soccer), prints 370,000 copies every day. The Star prints 260,000.
There must be something in the water in this country discouraging people to get their information from newsprint. It can't be the quality of reporting, which, though in decline, by many accounts still remains some of the strongest in the world.
Courses in our Communication Studies department often emphasize the differences between TV and print journalism.
Your average news piece on video works on three or four points. In print, the number rises to somewhere around 20. Print has the luxury of complexity because it offers automatic rewind.
It's not good to confuse a reader, but, should it happen, he or she can go back and read the previous paragraph.
Print offers the luxury of length. The essential information can start the article, and, for the reader who wants more, it keeps on going.
Advertising is on the page, but doesn't intrude in the same way as on video.
I'm not blind - I like video and I'm not immune to the power of images.
I'm a firm believer that one picture can tell a thousand words. But I also believe a thousand words can create a million pictures in a reader's mind - especially when written by a solid, professional journalist.
Maybe newspapers will soon end up being "Kindled" - we will be reading our news on some sort of paper-thin device connected to Internet. Already many are examining new business models of supplying free devices to newspaper subscribers.
But that isn't a reality yet.
And, even when it eventually happens, much as I still adore the tactile option of a well-crafted broadsheet, the method of delivery is, in and of itself, fairly superfluous.
What is important is the content.
Content is king. You can pretty it up with moving or still images, but there really is no substitute for the written word.
So, when you graduate and no longer have access to those free papers some of you are currently ignoring, please rethink the issue.
You will not be well served by bloggers blogging other bloggers.
Real reporting is done by those who hit the pavement and contact sources directly - not by those who regurgitate news collected by others.
Bloggers have a huge value - they distill the mass of information available and present it in a digestible format.
But they don't create it.
So spend a few dollars each week. Support a future journalist.
Support your freedom and preserve the sources of real written information in whatever format you choose.
And while you're here at the university, get into what should be a regular habit - pick up a newspaper every day.
dsimons@unews.com
