December 2021; revised September 2024
While journalism in its purest form was once revered — and there is much now that is not, one medium for its expression has changed such that newsprint — and newspapers themselves — are on the verge of becoming extinct. I watched some of the last Dodos up-close throughout my career.
My family tradition growing up was that the first riser in the morning retrieved the newspaper off the front porch, no matter what the weather. Then I turned up the furnace and read the comics. Peanuts, Blonde and Smilin’ Jack were my favorites. I read syndicated columnists; Mike Royko and Russell Baker were my favorites.
The tradition continued when my small daughters shared the newspaper’s comics at breakfast while I read the “non-comics.” Later, they would be expected to clip an article and present it in class as if they had actually digested the subject, whether the reason was “current events” or “bring-and-brag.”
Front porches became a base for micro businesses long before there were micro loans. My older brother was the first to become a “paperboy” (as would friends and girls).
Newspapers became my first business as well. After turning 11, I met with the station manager to put my name in for a route of my own; I wanted to deliver the afternoon paper, which also meant I’d be delivering the morning paper early on Sundays.
You could call it an internship; I “subbed” for a kid who was going to be away for a month. “Easy peezy,” riding my trusty 20-inch “sting ray” bike around his route. Shortly afterward, I too became a full-fledged paperboy, but assigned to an awful route that included delivering to house boats on “Watery Lane.” The bike was not so trusty going up the killer-steep hill from the river, but I persevered every day.
To make matters worse, not everyone paid their bills. When I took over the paper route, I became an independent contractor. I bought newspapers and received a bill each month for all the papers I delivered that month at a reduced rate, the difference becoming my profit. I knocked on doors to “collect” payment, but this first route would be a real hard knock: I barely collected enough to pay the bill, and the deadbeats who refused to open the door when I knocked denied my income for a month of work.
I gave up on this route two months later when route 619 became available; the northern boundary was a block away from home. The route included five long streets with hills, a dog that came out to retrieve the paper in her mouth, apartments across a creek — complete with ducks, as well as a profit.
I delivered over 100 daily papers six days a week, which were rolled and stuffed into a canvas bag that hung from my bike handlebars. I delivered over 80 Sunday morning papers dropped off at the house. I can still remember the sound of the heavy paper bundles crashing on the same porch — 80 instead of one — between three and four on Sunday mornings: the sound of money!
I’ve always wanted to enter Warren Buffet’s paper tossing contest at the annual Berkshire Hathaway shareholders meeting; his first job was also delivering newspapers.
I rode in the heat, through fall leaves, driving rain and snow, but I delivered on time and with a smile. My hands were often numb after winter days, despite gloves. On rainy days I came home thoroughly soaked from the edge of my coat down to my shoes. Perseverance with bonuses.
Despite the physical trials, the relationships with customers helped me develop a sense of customer service and integrity; when I broke a screen door, I paid for its replacement, no questions.
Paper delivery included the side benefit of winning trips and prizes for selling new subscriptions to the morning and/or afternoon papers. The selling part was brand new.
Who wouldn’t want to go to Disneyland? The publisher would provide transportation to and from (on chartered buses), hotel accommodation in the Disneyland Hotel (four to a room) and tickets for two days in the park. Winning meant selling 105 points, which translated into 3 points for a daily and Sunday subscription, two points for daily-only, and one point for Sunday-only.
I was sold! I rode my bike to large apartment complexes on weekends, when people typically moved in, to sign them up for a subscription before they signed themselves up. I also learned to set a goal of three points a day. If I sold six points, I could take a day off or get to the goal faster. I sold enough points in less than 30 days for the trip. These smaller, bite-sized goals and the face-to-face sales would serve me when I sold equipment financing almost 25 years later.
The following year was a two-day trip to San Francisco, which came with some free time the second afternoon to roam the city. Years later as a parent I ask, who lets 12-, 13-, 14-year-olds roam a major city alone? The following year was another trip to Disneyland for me.
When Spokane hosted Expo ‘74, the publisher offered a trip and I took my last. This time, I used my newspaper profits to buy my first-ever plane ticket — and independence — flying from Spokane back home to Portland. I was done with long bus rides, done selling subscriptions, done delivering.
It wasn’t until my freshman year in college that I worked on the inside of my next newspaper job doing “paste-up,” the physical layout of the college tabloid pages. (I was also a DJ on the college radio station.) Articles were “typeset” (the college owned a Varityper), which output film that was fed into a developer bath, much like a photograph, then hung to dry for a few minutes. I also learned some typesetting basics.
The production person would run the typeset film through a “waxer,” which applied a thin coat of wax to the back side as an adhesive. Photos and text were waxed and positioned on full-sized layout pages which could be easily repositioned. I watched the editor accidentally wax his tie.
Our primary tools were rulers, the trusty X-Acto knife with a number 11 blade (which I still have and use) and a T-square that ensured the copy was aligned correctly with the grid. We used a separate room in the office for layout on several large drafting tables.
By my freshman year-end, I was set on elevating my writing with an intensive year in a nearby university journalism school. I returned to the college my junior year with my sights back on the newspaper. By spring term, I was ready to take on the editor-in-chief role my senior year.
I had fun as editor, making sure the paper covered important topics such as the theft of a sculpture and the incoming college president, as well as writing articles and producing the paper’s first style guide. But by yearend, I was beat from studying and newspapering: we partied on our last paste-up night with a keg in the layout room.
After graduation, I gave writing a go as a vocation: I sold two freelance articles locally, but at $50 each, I would starve as a writer!
I fell back on paste-up, taking a job as production “manager” for a weekly suburban tabloid newspaper. There were three ad salespeople, the editor and a reporter who was also the photographer, plus me. The publisher, a very conservative individual who was also computer savvy, owned an early Osborne personal computer that could, with some added coding, go directly to typeset copy on the paper’s Compugraphic typesetter; ironically, this was only a few years before the Macintosh. I was paid regularly just below the poverty level for a family of four to produce the physical storytelling of a suburban community.
While the methods would be the same, the content was anything but meaningful at my next stop. A former ad salesperson, who had jumped ship from the suburban paper, contacted me, telling me her new publisher was a better place to work. I joined the 24/7 commercial printer/publisher, which published a weekly “shopper” meaning it was a newspaper in name only; it was more of a wrapper around major retailer advertising sections of local grocery stores and other retailers, also (conveniently) printed by the publisher. The content was mostly syndicated columns, recipes and comics, including the first local publication of a single panel comic called “The Far Side” by Gary Larson. The shopper arrived on Tuesdays — “Food Day” in newspaper parlance — in everyone’s mail, at great cost to the daily paper’s revenue, which I had once delivered.
At first, I was hired for the graveyard paste-up (again) shift: four 10-hour days beginning on Tuesday at 8 PM, ending at 6:30 AM on Saturday morning. While working four days a week had its benefits, the days (or nights) were long. It was hard to adjust to working all night. I eventually moved to a five-day, noon-to-8:30 PM shift.
My steady girlfriend (and now wife!) and I had been dating since my time at the suburban paper. My graveyard shifts were during her senior year at the same college; she would come during my lunch hour sometime around midnight as a study break. Later, I would drop by the house she lived in off campus, knocking on the window and visiting with her before she went to class and I to sleep.
I was getting itchy feet for additional schooling, setting my sights on what would be a two-year hiatus to San Francisco to attend an art school for advertising design while she attended graduate school.
When I returned from San Francisco, I was hired by one of the major advertisers in the shopper for whom I had done paste-up. Later, I was part of the early adoption of Macintosh computers—then only four years old—for advertising design; fortunately, I had borrowed one from a friend and poured over all-things Mac OS every night for a month to come up-to-speed.
Macs weren’t ready for direct typesetting, although we tested it from time to time with display ads. While at this retailer, I received in the mail a 400K demo disk for a new program, Adobe Illustrator. I had no idea how important the Adobe programs would be; I was using a software program called PageMaker at the time. The retailer was a large Macintosh account for a fledgling PC store, which invited the Macintosh users to an afternoon on a client appreciation river cruise. There I met PageMaker founder Paul Brainerd who coined the phrase “desktop publishing;” we were living it every day.
But I was over newspapers, ad design and paste-up. I jumped from newspapers into corporate marketing, thinking I would never look back.
But my experience with newspapers would be handy later in corporate marketing. To promote professional services expertise, I pitched to and published articles in local business newspapers, ghost-wrote some, even scoring a placement in the daily paper I had once delivered. And I would be designing corporate print and digital ads for many years.
Paste-up would die as computer software utilized “WYSIWYG” tools. My first corporate marketing job required Mac and Adobe software experience. I would buy my first Mac shortly after starting in corporate marketing as well, producing a freelance brochure entirely in PageMaker.
Daily newspapers have become less vital. The shopper was bought by the daily and incorporated into its “Food Day” alternative, later downsizing into the smaller tabloid format. There were no tea leaves to read, but I was fortunate to be ahead of the technology changes and the slow death of newspapers, moving on before I was moved out.
A love of reading and writing, customer service, goal setting, financial responsibility, sales skills, design and software training: newspapers gave me far more than the ink-stained fingers from reading and delivering daily papers.