Forget cotton, paper is the fabric of our lives
By John Guigayoma
June 8, 2008 9:13 p.m.
The night I left my magazine internship two summers ago, I rode the train home while my four editors drank from a keg.
They threw themselves a party but didn’t tell the interns. I only found out a year later, when I ran into one of them in a record store on Sunset Boulevard. Flustered from our awkward run-in, he shuffled through African music CDs until he finally let it slip: The night I left was the end.
I didn’t know it two years ago as my train flew across Chinatown, but the print version of the magazine was going under. Advertisers wouldn’t invest in a tiny indie weekly on the East Side when, provided you have a decent Internet connection, a Web site can reach anyone anywhere. I remember checking their Web site, and in huge bold letters they proclaimed, “PRINT IS DEAD.”
But if print is dead, then the state of the newspaper worries me. But not in the interest of journalism’s survival.
I honestly don’t know many who actually read newspapers, but I know plenty who live with them. As a guy who thinks news will be around as long as there are people to make it, I’m going to miss the paper.
My friend wrapped a sweater in an old sheet of newspaper and taped it up. By a photo of a basketball player, his sweat-streaked face racing toward the hoop above him, she wrote, “To Dad! Happy Birthday!”
When my friend gave me a haircut, the flood in India lined the floor. When another friend’s shower pipes broke, old theater reviews soaked up his mess. When one guy’s dog had to pee, the budget deficit became a dull yellow.
I wonder how many pinatas were wrapped in natural disasters, or how many decoupage trays came out of John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
And one cold morning, I wore a thick jacket and walked out to campus, expecting to come across the man I saw each day who slept in the tiny nook of an office building. He was gone that morning, but the space where he rested echoed of his body.
I stepped closer to investigate, and the only trace left were little specks of gray ingrained into the cement: bits of headlines, shreds of photos, worn-down bylines.
The bed he made was the few sheets of newspaper that he slept on. All that was left were the scraps of life.
Guigayoma was a photographer, senior staff writer and the 2006-2007 Viewpoint editor.
