Russell Beattie

I'm trying to get back on a more normal sleep schedule, so I went to bed at a relatively normal hour last night, slept when it was actually dark outside, and woke up early. Had some fried eggs and toast, and am listening to NPR Weekend Sunday while perusing the web a bit. In the past I would have gone and gotten a big Sunday newspaper (or walked out and picked it up off the front lawn) but I've long since lost that habit and instead just read the web. It's nice to have a big paper, but I never read even 1/10th of it, so it's generally a massive waste of a dead tree.

That said, there's things you get from a Sunday paper that I miss because they aren't replicated anywhere else very well. First, there's a massive amount of news that you could pick and choose from, and very importantly a huge page of comics... big colorful cartoons that are amusing to start your day with - including the ones you never really understand, but have been in that particular paper for the past 73 years or something. Then the inserts, both the editorial and commercial stuff - especially around this time, there's all the back-to-school ads, and summer sales, etc. mixed in with the Sunday magazines and supplements - like Parade, New York Magazine, Travel, Arts, Book Reviews or whatever - that have everything from specialized articles to weekly columns and puzzles, etc. And then there's the community calendar stuff where you'd find out about local shows, or museum displays. And even stuff that isn't used much any more like TV schedules and classifieds. When you think about the amount of effort involved in creating and gathering all the stuff that goes into the Sunday paper each week, it's pretty astounding actually.

But more than just the content, there's a sort of shared experience with a Sunday paper as well. Sitting around with family and/or friends at a coffee shop and passing around parts of the paper, grabbing your favorites, pointing out interesting things, etc. It's entertainment, information, and community all sort of rolled into one, and generally a good way to start a Sunday I think. It's something the web hasn't actually done a great job of duplicating yet...

-Russ