Buffalo News

When I was a kid there was one thing that I was consistently in trouble for:

I didn’t put the newspaper back together when I was done reading it, or I was actually reading it when my Dad wanted it.

My love affair with the newspaper has gone on all my life, and I’m one of the few guys who still buys one every day.

The gas station/convenience store has 20 brought in each day, and they rarely sell all of them. They used to get 50.

My children have never taken the paper from me. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen one of them reading it, but if I mention a story, they’ve already seen it online somewhere.

I bring this all up because I’m sad.

Bucky Gleason took a buy-out, and so did Jerry Sullivan (among others).

The paper is now down to 3 sections and some of the weekly features are being eliminated.

It’s happened all over the country.

The newspaper industry is dying.

The entire industry is being attacked as fake news, or failing this or dying that and what’s stepping into the void are writers who can’t write and a whole new group of people who think that everything should be free.

Writers like Gleason or Sullivan (very competent guys) are being replaced by Vinny from a basement somewhere writing his recap of the Bills game.

Sullivan was the type of reporter who always seemed pissed. He took the owners, coaches and players to task, and he didn’t just root, root, root for the home team.

He was roundly hated in some circles. He was also from New England and people who knew that, hated him for just that. I understood that he’d sing the praises of the Sux and bash the Yankees.

I could live with that because I thought he wrote well.

I gotta confess. I don’t much care for how we do music now. I don’t like it streaming to my phone or my iPod. I don’t care for the fact that no one buys full albums anymore. It’s one song, and everything is shuffled.

Now I have to adjust again?

I don’t know where the writers I’ve read for years are going to show up. I imagine they’ll resurface somewhere.

I’ll just have to search them out and read them on my stupid phone.

No crinkling pages, no ink on my hands, no “Cliff! Where’s the paper?”

I’m a little sad.

I don’t like change!

Good luck to my writer/reporter friends.

It’s been fun.

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