Philadelphia Newspapers and Me

I grew up during the last great era of the newspaper, the decade or so after the end of World War II. From then until the 1990s, when the computer began to render the daily paper irrelevant, I was a confirmed newspaper reader.

Everyone in my family – my grandfather, my two aunts and uncle – were dedicated newspaper readers except for the comics, then called ‘the funnies,’ which was my specialty. The papers were passed around. Everyone had their favorites. My two aunts liked the Bulletin because of recipes and pieces about the Hollywood scene. My uncle was a big fan of the Inquirer, which matched his right-wing interest during the years it was run by Walter Annenberg. Grandpop, with just a third-grade education, stuck to the Daily News, which usually featured a crude photo on the cover, often an attractive woman or the scene of a crime.

When I began school, I could already read a bit, mostly because of those comic sections of the Inquirer and Bulletin. I had my favorites: Dick Tracy with its string of weird villains: Flat Top, Pruneface, B.O. Plenty. I particularly liked Prince Valiant, Chief Wahoo, and Minnehaha, which evolved into an adventure strip called Steve Roper because they were so well drawn. I was a little snob and judged the comics by their artwork.

It was common when I first started teaching in college in the 1960s, for me to come to class and find most of my students reading a paper – the Daily News with its superb sports page being the most popular. (You read the Daily News from the back where you found the great writers: Jack McKinney, Larry Merchant, Stan Hochman, Bill Conlin). Occasionally, a budding campus intellectual would browse the New York Times before class.

Around 2010, I started noticing that the papers were giving way to the cellphone. (I also noted around the same time that wrist watches, once a necessity for all men and many women, were disappearing). By my last year teaching, 2018, I felt safe in saying that I hadn’t seen a student with a paper in five or six years.

Today the daily newspaper is just about dead, a victim of first television and then the more deadly rise of the computer. The Bulletin, which once boasted the slogan – “In Philadelphia Nearly Everyone Reads the Bulletin” – was done in by television, which rendered its afternoon news superfluous. The Daily News today is a joke – I can’t believe anyone would spend $2.75 to read it. Like the weekly magazine, including the once great Time, the daily paper is slowly drifting into obsolescence.

Philadelphia is down to one paper, what is left of the Inquirer with its circulation of 60,000, a paper that once boasted a Sunday readership of one million – the once thick edition which landed on your doorstep with a loud thud every Sunday morning.

he only papers that seem to be thriving today are the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Both boost large online subscribers. I would think that the Inquirer is getting by for the same reason, though their subscriber base can’t approach the other two giants. To some extent the daily papers lost their audience when they became overwhelming political in support of one party or the other. People today can turn away from the political bent of a paper and read the web to satisfy their political leanings. No Republican, for example, would find much to comfort him in the Inquirer today, which in many ways has become an extension of the Democratic party for all practical purposes. Try to think of the last Republican it endorsed for President.

Does the daily paper have a future? I doubt it. The web and its incredibly various sites and podcasts have robbed the newspaper of its uniqueness and robbed it of its audience.

I hope I am wrong.

John P. Rossi is a retired professor of history from La Salle University.