timrogers@daltoncitizen.com
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My first job in newspapers will be a familiar one to many of you.
I delivered them.
Five afternoons a week for five years — plus Sunday mornings — I delivered the Chapel Hill newspaper to about 70 families in the Lake Shore area of Chapel Hill, N.C.
My primary means of getting up and down the hills of my neighborhood with my load of papers across my shoulders was my trusty 10-speed, but on Sundays I had to use the car because of the inserts and the fact that it was still dark outside.
For the first three years, that meant my father had the same wake-up time I did, but when I got my license he made it clear I was on my own.
My parents have always read the newspaper and I grew up with two, the Raleigh paper in the morning and the Chapel Hill paper in the afternoon.
I didn’t write for a paper when I was in high school or college but I loved getting that stack of papers in the afternoon (unless I was missing out on something) and being the first to find out what was going on. The biggest breaking story that I remember delivering was the news that Anwar Sadat had been assassinated but there are many other stories that were big at the time that have since faded from my memory.
Before I ever worked for a paper or thought about working for one, I was used to getting my hands dirty from newsprint. I still believe that is the best way to get the news, even if it isn’t the only way I get my news now.
Websites, e-mail, texts, tweets and Facebook posts hold none of the same allure to me that the good old printed product does, but I recognize that they all play a valuable role in transmitting information in this day and age.
It is through our digital edition that my father reads The Daily Citizen every day from his computer in Durham, N.C.
My father is adept at navigating websites, but, for the most part, he despises them. He doesn’t think they are well organized and in general he thinks it is very hard to find anything specific in them. He has let me know this about every website that I have ever had a hand in and he does this in no uncertain terms. I guess when you are 80, you don’t feel any special need to spare your son’s feelings.
It was no great surprise to me, then, when he voiced his opinion about our website shortly after I moved here. It was a surprise, however, that he had found something he really liked, our digital edition.
He likes it because it looks like a paper, not a website, and he can digitally leaf through it page by page just like he would a paper.
Thanks to some new improvements to the site, he can also now cut and paste stories that he likes right from the digital edition and send them to friends.
My father isn’t the only person who enjoys using our digital edition, but it is still an underused part of our website. If you subscribe to the paper you can sign up for the digital edition for free or you can subscribe just to the digital edition. It is ready every morning for you to read just like the paper.
If you have friends or family who no longer live in the Dalton area but want to keep up with what is happening here it is the best way I know of to do it.
Change happens to us all and it does so in ways both large and small. We will still be a paper for a long time, but gradually more and more people will get their news from us electronically. That has been happening for more than a decade and will keep happening.
For me, our digital edition is the best of both worlds.
A web based solution for getting information, while still being able to enjoy that traditional look of the paper.
And it doesn’t even get your hands dirty.
