It’s getting hard and harder to find a newspaper for sale

Late last month, my son and I were photographed outside of Columbia College Chicago for a story about my employer’s new policy limiting children on campus. 

The Chicago Tribune photographer captured him in a wrap on my back, his blue Vans untied and a floral mask covering his face. It was my baby’s first newspaper photo. 

I’m just old school enough that after I saw the story online (and after I shared it on social media) that I decided I should get a copy of the print edition for the scrapbook I will put together for him one of these years, probably after he’s gone to college.

I am not a print subscriber to the Tribune. In fact, I am embarrassed to admit that I currently do not get a single print newspaper subscription delivered to my home. I have stacks of New Yorkers that I don’t have time to read and library books at my bedside that have been there for weeks, automatically renewing without me opening them.

I am a working parent of three little boys, and my days of being able to sit with the Sunday newspaper and read it over coffee are behind me, for now. I’m busy in the morning getting my children ready for school, frantically answering emails and trying to plan my day so I’m most likely to scan the headlines online and flag stories I want to read later in the day. I still pay for and consume journalism through a number of digital subscriptions. But I consume almost all of my news online right now.

Nonetheless, I wanted my son to have a copy of the picture, something to save, to yellow eventually. So I stopped at a convenience store to buy the paper. Sorry, the clerk told me. They don’t sell the paper. I tried another store. And another. And then another. I must have searched a half-dozen stores within a one-block radius of my north side Chicago home looking for a print copy of the paper. 

Once again I went on a search, trying gas stations, more convenience stores and even several coffee shops. I finally find a copy at the grocery store.

The last time I had to look this hard for a newspaper was when I was living in Oman in the Middle East. It was the fall of 2011, and Arab Spring protests had broken out in the sleepy sultanate. I had seen piles of newspapers, untouched, in the stores for weeks before the protests began. They rarely carried actual news and certainly not news that challenged the government. But after the protests started in Oman, the newspaper publishers became emboldened and started carrying actual news. It was suddenly difficult to find a newspaper and not because the government was confiscating them. People were actually buying them because they had information that was valuable.

The only other time I’ve not been able to find a paper in Chicago was in 2016 when the Cubs won the World Series. I was at The Washington Post when Barack Obama was elected as the nation’s first Black president and was able to get my souvenir copies in the newsroom.

There was nothing particular about the Wednesday my son’s photograph ran in the Chicago Tribune.

I ultimately posted on our neighborhood Facebook page to see if anyone with a print subscription could give me the paper for that day. A couple of neighbors responded, and I picked up my copy the next morning. But the story wasn’t there. It ran a few days later on the front page, which I found out about when a neighbor texted me a picture that his mother-in-law had taken and sent.

I had a different relationship with The Washington Post when I lived in DC undoubtedly because I worked there. But the Post also prided–and sold itself at the time, as a local newspaper with a national reputation. 

I’ve had a harder time feeling connected to Chicago’s largest daily. The Tribune does some incredible journalism, and I have much respect for its reporters and editors, some of whom were colleagues of mine at our student newspaper in college. But the paper has never really felt like a hometown newspaper, not in the way that a newspaper should.

It strikes me that this disconnect I feel is one that others can relate to; we mostly consume our news online in a format that feels impersonal even when our clicks generate personalized ads. (The latest Pew Research Center survey from earlier this year found that more than eight of 10 Americans read their news online.)

We know our readers, our future is digital because it already is. We know our neighbors are more likely to read us online than in print. 

But I also think if we want to keep or regain the public’s faith in what we do, if we want to be relevant to younger and younger audiences, we have to find a way to reclaim that hometown feel that newspapers used to have, that idea, however fleeting it now seems, that we were connected.

It’s hard to feel connected when you can’t even find the paper.

A version of this story first appeared in Publisher’s Auxiliary, the only national publication serving America’s community newspapers. It is published by the National Newspaper Association. GJR is partnering with Pub Aux to re-print Jackie Spinner’s monthly “Local Matters” column on our website. Spinner is the editor of Gateway Journalism Review. Follow her on Twitter @jackiespinner.