Where Do You Get Your News?

Fifty-plus Boomers grew up in the newspaper generation. Many of us got our news from the print media, as did our parents. Radio always had local news, but we wanted to “read” and “see” the news, so we relied on the daily papers. Yes, papers with an “s” – many cities had more than one newspaper, even into the 1970s, and there were multiple editions of each to accommodate “breaking news.”

By the 1960s, television began to take over as a primary news source. National nightly newscasts expanded to 30-minutes in 1963, with anchor stars like Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley.

Technology enabled live coverage of breaking news to grow, and the 60s provided many opportunities for picture-ready stories. Big stories of that decade included: the assassinations of John Kennedy (1963), Robert Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (both in 1968), the first human lunar landing (1969) and race riots and the Vietnam war through the whole decade. For many of us, however, the newspaper remained the primary source for the complete story.

The newspaper and coffee were the center of my Sunday morning ritual from the 1970s until today. My paper of choice for thirteen years has been the Washington Post, and I’ve subscribed to at least the Sunday edition for most of those years. But today – and I literally mean today – I began what I believe will be my new Sunday ritual. A laptop and coffee. I read my Sunday paper online. Why today? Because for the third time this year, the Sunday Washington Post was not there when I went out to get it. My home delivery person screwed up one time too many.

I occasionally read Post articles online anyway, but today I tried to read everything I would read in print on the internet instead. I still like the feel of paper and ink, but this laptop screen never misses a Sunday. And the online version is free.


Admittedly this newspaper ritual is a bit old school. Younger Boomers and Gen-Xers probably don’t read the paper all that much. At least one study says 65% of people get their news from TV; newspapers are a distant second with just over 28%. The internet, of course, provides hundreds or thousands of additional sources, so who really needs newspapers?

I haven’t given up on newspapers. But my Sunday ritual may have changed permanently.

Where do you get your news?