Missing the Monitor

The last issue of my favorite daily, The Christian Science Monitor, was printed on Friday.  On the editorial page editor John Yemma exuded excitement in Friday’s issue about the new era of the online paper.  I have resisted the impulse to write the Monitor for months, since they first announced they would be dropping the daily print version of the paper and going to an online version with a weekly digest.  I wrote a few mental letters, pleading with them to reconsider – asking them if this didn’t seem too abrupt.  However in all of these rehearsed unwritten letters I sounded like a jilted lover asking if we couldn’t just give it another chance.  So, I never wrote those letters.

For years I have gladly paid $175 for my Monitor subscription, hoping that somehow this subscription price from a loyal reader base was enough to sustain the paper. But at the end of the day, of course, this wasn’t true.   With grim inevitability the daily paper quietly ended on Friday.

So this morning, I clicked into the Monitor site to compare the experience.  I found what I have found with other on-line news – that whereas with the printed newspaper I would read my way deep into articles, even on subjects in which I do not have too much interest, with the on-line versions I seem to be willing to just scan headlines.  I don’t understand this.  It is much harder to fold back the pages of a paper and read over the creases than it is to click through to the rest of the article.  But there you have it.  Our attachment to newspapers and books and other out-of-date experiences isn’t really a rational experience.  It is emotional.  It’s like losing afriend.  I miss my old friend, the Christian Science Monitor.