Journey Home

Not long after the Kennedy assassination, Mother found me a job as a newspaper boy. Before dawn, I rode my bicycle to pick up a bundle of Des Moines Register dailies and deliver them. The homes were spread out because the Register was not our local paper. It was the route that was available. My goal was to take a paper from my bag, fold and toss it on the porch, as close to the door as possible, without getting off my bike. I could do it most of the time. I almost never saw my customers because the Register had centralized billing and I did not have to do collections. It was just me, my bicycle, and my newspaper bag in early morning darkness.

Even though I delivered newspapers for the Register, then the afternoon Times-Democrat, until starting high school, I seldom read them. I preferred to read books I selected at the public library. Once the job provided money of my own, I bought books at the drugstore near the end of my route. My customers did read the paper, though.

In 1965, the Des Moines Register, under the Cowles family who bought the paper in 1903, had become one of the nation’s premier regional newspapers, famous for statewide reporting, editorials, and investigative work. By the 1960s, it had national stature beyond the readers on my paper route. Newspapers weren’t “media” as we define that word today. They were the physical labor of printing and distributing newsprint, a community ritual. The ritual aspect was evidenced by some of my customers coaching me on where exactly on the porch they wanted to find their daily newspaper. Newspapers were part of the infrastructure of Midwestern life.

Readers sought newspapers to participate in community. Many were reading the same stories on the same day. They also sought noon radio news, and this was the time of the rise in nightly televised news which changed from 15 to 30 minutes in 1963. News was comparatively linear, bounded, and voluntary. A person made a conscious decision to sit down with a paper. The newspaper occupied a defined portion of the day. My work as a newspaper boy was the end of the line, though. Once delivered, newspapers and other news outlets did not actively pursue the reader’s attention.

My newspaper reading during and after high school and university was intermittent. In eighth grade, I completed a class project that involved clipping news stories and assembling them into an album. Later, at the University of Iowa, I regularly picked up the Daily Iowan to follow coverage of student anti-war demonstrations during the final years of the Nixon administration. The next newspaper-reading experience that stands out came while I was living in West Germany during the Cold War.

For three years I lived near the main railway station in Mainz, Germany. During scarce free time, I often walked to the station newsstand and bought copies of the International Herald Tribune, where many of the same stories published in the United States appeared in a reformatted international edition. The Stars and Stripes was also widely available, carrying American domestic news, sports, comics, and reports related to military affairs. By then I had become a steady consumer of news, both in print and through Armed Forces Radio, although the way I gave it attention differed little from my days as a newspaper boy.

In the military, I developed an identity that differed from the one I carried in civilian life. Mine became the “Iowan,” even though I had never thought much about Iowa as a defining identity before leaving home. During field exercises, bundles of Stars and Stripes arrived through the military supply chain and were distributed in the mess hall during meals. This Iowan and others like me read the paper not simply for information, but for reassurance that we were still participating in American life while stationed overseas.

I especially remember President Jimmy Carter’s 1978 trip to Wiesbaden during a state visit to West Germany. Our unit became involved in preparations for it. Afterward, reading about the visit in the newspaper felt like direct contact with public events. I saved newspaper clippings about Carter’s speech and the events. It felt like I was preserving pieces of history.

When I returned to Iowa after military service, many newspapers were experiencing strong financial performance. After the choppy waters of the 1970s—stagflation, a recession, and the fuel crisis—advertising remained strong. If a department store, grocery chain, automobile dealer, or realtor wanted to reach large numbers of local consumers, the newspaper remained the most efficient vehicle available. Newspapers were making money the way they printed advertisements.

This period of prosperity made diverse news coverage possible. In Iowa and elsewhere, newspapers could afford to send reporters across the state for feature stories, agricultural reporting, political campaigns, and local investigations because advertising revenue subsidized ambitious journalism. The Cowles family reaped the benefits of this period of economic growth. Eventually, though, they could not withstand the pressure of newspaper consolidation and were acquired by the Gannett Company, which later became USA Today.

What newspapers could not foresee during those profitable years was that their greatest vulnerability was not competition from other newspapers, television, or even radio. It was the transformation of human attention into a measurable and marketable commodity. Newspapers had always competed for readers, but they did not follow people through every idle moment of the day. Once the paper landed on the porch, the transaction was complete. Readers either opened it or they didn’t.

Writers such as Tim Wu in The Attention Merchants and Chris Hayes in The Sirens’ Call argue that modern media systems are designed not merely to inform but to capture and retain human attention. Digital platforms monitor clicks, scrolling behavior, viewing time, and engagement in ways newspapers never could. Earlier newspapers sought readers, but they could not track whether one page held attention longer than another. Modern systems can measure every interaction.

At first, newspapers participated enthusiastically in this transformation. Publishers moved content online, often giving it away free in the hope that digital advertising would replace print revenue. Instead, companies such as Google and Facebook absorbed much of the advertising income that once sustained local journalism. Classified ads virtually disappeared almost overnight. Newsrooms shrank. Stories increasingly came from wire services, syndicated material, and content-sharing agreements because local reporting had become expensive.

Today, when I open the digital edition of the Cedar Rapids Gazette, I find I already know many of the stories going in. During the day I encounter headlines through websites, social media, email alerts, and conversations. The newspaper no longer organizes the public’s attention in the way it once did. It now competes within a crowded marketplace where every platform seeks clicks, engagement, and time spent looking at a screen.

I still subscribe to a newspaper because they continue to provide something difficult to find elsewhere: a sense of deliberate attention. Someone has made decisions about what matters, arranged stories into a coherent order, and attempted to distinguish what is important. That older idea of news persists even as the economic and technological world that sustained it continues to disappear.

Our family first logged on to the internet using a personal computer and dial-up service on April 21, 1996. I didn’t anticipate how this new technology would change how I gathered news about our world and society. I certainly did not understand how media outlets would seek my attention and monetize it.

By then, the idea of a paperboy was more nostalgia than reality as adults began newspaper delivery in automobiles to cover a new set of challenges, including growing suburbs, declining circulation, and more complex logistics. The way newspapers are now is much different from when I tossed them on porches in early morning darkness.

While our sense of community changed, and newsprint has largely gone away, a newspaper remains important to our sense of community. There is value in that.