Old News

It's been a quiet winter day for me and newspapers popped into my radar a few times. My next blip will describe something more interesting than this, but which I came across after midnight.

For all of the time I've lived in this city, The Philadelphia Inquirer has been the dominant daily paper. However, it was an extremely important part of the culture then 30 years ago, whereas now it's easy enough to forget it exists, and it's on its last legs as so many old papers are.

I went out looking for a non-cat blip around 11 PM and accidentally noticed the headline. Wait a minute, I thought. I have not heard this on the radio. Then I realized the paper in the display window dates from February 2011 --it's 11 months old. It's an abandoned point of sale. They didn't bother to remove the box, even though they're still in business.

The Inquirer began life in 1829 and has changed for better and for worse many times since then. In the 1890s it was one of about seven dailies here, and certainly not one of the better ones. It was entirely in the pocket of the Republican Party machine and for my research purposes, it was either indifferent or useless. When local anarchists or other radical reformers did something, this paper would be the least likely to mention it, and if they did they just repeated what other papers wrote. The mainstream papers sometimes gave even-handed or even favorable coverage to these subjects, but when a paper clearly hated the striking workers, or an anarchist speaker, or a radical cause, I might learn a great deal from the pages where they ventilate their poison. I'll go from knowing close to nothing to at least knowing exactly where and when an event took place, and the names of some who were there. Early in my years of research I knew to check the Inquirer last, because I'd usually gain nothing from it. To be fair, there were earlier and later periods when it was a pillar of good journalism.

The death of such an old newspaper brings on a moment of reflection, but when I saw this box I figured the Philadelphia Inquirer is not letting the door hit it in the ass on the way out.