Did you ever have a paper route? Greg Quinn had one and sometimes I’d help him fold the papers. There’d be a stack of them waiting for him when he got home from school. He’d have to assemble the paper (it came with various sections), fold them up and then cram them into a canvas carryall that fit over his head and rested on his shoulders. Then he’d get on his bike and toss the papers, grabbing the next paper as he rode along until his canvas tote was empty. I think all the papers had to be delivered by 5 PM. It seemed like a good gig until that time of the month when he’d have to collect from his customers and some of them would tell Greg to go fuck himself because instead of delivering the paper onto the porch each evening Greg would mostly toss the paper into the bushes.

Did you ever play the video game Paperboy? It came out as an arcade game in 1985 and you tossed the fictitious Daily Sun onto porches as you rode through the neighborhood on your bike. If you didn’t time it right, you’d break windows with an errant paper throw or get chased by a dog. It was pretty much the only video game I played or knew how to play, in my entire life. That’s because it seems I’ve wasted most of my life with a sick interested in real newspapers.

I heard two radio hosts yesterday stumble off road and onto the topic of newspapers. One said he still gets the Los Angeles Times delivered every day and the other says he hasn’t picked up a paper in years. One augments life with a newspaper and the other has moved on. Everyone’s trying to be real-time-Ronnie (or Rhonda), so I get the, “Give it to me now, keep it short, just the facts” mindset, but I think daily life without a newspaper (a printed one or online) just makes us less literate and we really can’t afford to collectively get any dumber.

Californians are especially susceptible to a newspaper-less existence. There’s no evening papers, virtually no newsstands and we move in cars, living life basically without the train-subway-bus rituals that fuel the newspaper culture in cities like Chicago, New York and Boston.Culture clash aside, the real rub here is one of depth and substance. This is not a lament about the death of the newspaper, it’s about the intelligence and perspective lost when all we know about a topic is a video clip or a summary sentence.

Smartphone-newsfeed guy may very well be more informed, maybe even more intellectually well rounded, than no-news-at-all guy, but he misses the chance to choose for himself what he likes and feels is important. Today, newsfeed-guy gets told/served what someone else thinks is most important (a newspaper may be equally biased, but at least you can turn the page and make a few of your own editorial decisions). He also misses out on the insights and discovery that often happen when people dive into a subject a little deeper. Is there really nothing of value beyond the home page or the lead paragraph or 140 characters?

It becomes a story about balance. There’s no doubt that the news is mostly bad, but if we only get news from soundbites we hear or TV and radio or from the Twitterverse then we’d be left with the impression that the only thing that happened on earth on any given day was that the president said something stupid and that a white business owner grabbed a chick’s ass or dropped his pants. In point of fact, the daily perusal of a newspaper reveals quite a bit more, like this …

Scientists discovered hundreds of fossilized pterosaur eggs. Pterosaurs are not dinosaurs, but flying reptiles. They lived from the late Triassic to the end of the Cretaceous (roughly 228 million to 66 million years ago). They’re the earliest known vertebrates to have developed powered flight – tens of millions of years before birds arose from dinosaurs – and different species ranged in size from that of an F-16 fighter jet (holy crap!) to a paper airplane, according to the American Museum of Natural History. Who knew? It was right there in the paper, someone delivered it right to my house!

The real stories, real knowledge, real enlightenment are on the pages, not on the cover or in your social media timeline. Being informed may be the first step to greater knowledge, but being superficially informed should never be confused with the whole picture. There’s lots of cool stuff on life’s back pages. It’s a smart move, me thinks, to keep a newspaper or two in your daily info mix.