Hard copy, hard choice

16 hours ago , by Richard Lutz

Farewell San Serriff. I knew thee well, writes RICHARD LUTZ

It’s 2025 and it’s time to hang up the hard copy of a paper I’ve bought and read for more than a half century. I’m going digital.

It’s like this: each day, The Guardian, the paper of record (in my household  at least), thudded through my door, was left on my front step or picked up at my newsagent.

But now, no more. As of this week, things have changed. Times have changed. I’ve cancelled the paper and its Sunday edition The Observer, and gone electronic. I’ve jumped off the e-cliff.

Now, every morning at 4.30  the online paper drops. No doorflap, no soggy front step, no fumbling with rumpled vouchers rescued from the bottom of a forgotten pocket. No comfy chat with the guy at the shop.

So goodbye Guardian hard copy that I knew so well. All the way back to the long ago 1970’s when it wrestled with stories about the Irish Troubles, Watergate, the three day week, Jeremy Thorpe. I revelled in journalists with names like Hella Pick, Nicholas de Jongh, Nancy Banks Smith and the very topnotch-sounding Stuart St Clair Legge- a name that could fit comfortably in a Wodehouse novel.

Also back to the days when The Guardian was a bulky broadsheet with a northern and southern edition. And to its credit in 1977,  when it included a seven page pull-out  exploring the hidden wonders of the exotic island of San Serriffe which intrigued me until it clicked that it was 1st April and San Serrif was a printing font…..

But despite its big time 200 hundred year history, its continued presence of superb reporting and steel edged writing, I just couldn’t see waiting for the day’s edition to hit the breakfast table when it’s online each morning.

Another nail in the death of the printed newspaper

So, I’ll still get the paper in a fashion, a paper that published worldwide exclusives and won The Pulitzer Prize in 2014 and still is in the forefront of daily news reporting and….this is a big one… has a crossword puzzle even I can finish (sometimes) even though I had to learn how to complete it on my iPad.

I guess I join the others who have stopped rustling the hard copy pages. The circulation was more than 200,000 in 2011 and was halved by 2021. I guess I’m another mini-nail in the slow death of its print editions. I’m part of the problem.

And , it seems, in some areas, the problem lies in just getting hands on it. A newsagent shrugged when I asked for a copy and said: ‘This isn’t a Guardian neighbourhood..’ A little village shop just had its morning supply reduced from two to one. ’It’s the distributor,’ she said, ‘They just don’t sell sometimes.’

But as I learn more about getting my news online, I can turn to small successes in the world of ink and print. I refer to the latest edition of local literary efforts.

Yes, it’s the tenth anniversary issue of fiction from the Ayrshire town of Girvan.

Good to see the efforts of folks scribbling away to perfect and publish their stories large and small. Stories of our inner lives, stories of big successes and maybe even bigger failures, science fiction, romance and adventure and memories, all ingredients in the blood of our histories.

A special Hats Off then to writers Chris Armour and Ruth Gillham. And a nod to editor Derek Hall for the unending job of getting it done and into print. It’s now for sale worldwide at all better bookstores (if book stores still exist) and even, I might add, on the shelves of our village telephone box which has been turned into a free library.

You see, we need more little books like the Girvan effort. Especially with papers losing hard copy readers (like me) and the world turning ever inwards into the intestines of the web with all its unending glories, its power, its omniscient shadow and all its horrors.