The Daily News

Yesterday it was announced that the New York Daily News would cut – lay off – it’s editorial staff by 50 percent, something like forty jobs lost. Other media and liberal politicians are decrying this move (an effort for the company to stay profitable) and tarring it with the usual blah blah blah: greed, injustice, and money must now be spent to keep the staff at full level.

It’s all b-s.

Society’s changed. The way we get our news has changed. It’s the old horse buggy versus automobile thing. People are laid off all the time. Just ask yours truly, whose been laid off three times in a six year span in an industry extremely overdue for an overhauling.

Plus, it’s a neat dose of schadenfreude to watch ostensible leftists advocating leftist policies getting upsmacked via the marketplace’s invisible hand. Keep unionizing and raising that minimum wage, fellas.

But it’s also sad in a way, for me, because I have a soft spot for the Daily News.

Now, I can’t remember the last time I read the newspaper, let alone actually paid for it. Must be at least twenty years or so. I remember reading it on vacation in a hotel room in Lake George sometime in the late 90s, but only because someone probably picked it up on a breakfast run. Yeah, it’s been a while.

But way, way back, in the dog days of 1979, my parents bought a subscription and I read through it every day that entire summer.

It became a sort of highlight for me. I would trot off to art school in the morning, walk the six or seven blocks back home at noon, and there the paper would be, on the couch or on the side table, with a headline screaming out at me. I knew nothing really of the world outside the front door – my world was basically my school and family. There was no internet, no cable TV (well, there might have been, but only with twenty or thirty channels, not four hundred), and my main interest was reading gnarled science fiction paperbacks.

So I would thumb through the Daily News, feel the texture of the pages, the ink on my fingers, scan headlines and devour, cautiously at first, anything and everything that seemed interesting. I started following one of the comics – was it Gasoline Alley? – that branched off in strange directions (I wasn’t into comics). I did the Jumble puzzle every day, the crossword being too difficult. And at the end of my daily investigation, I would peruse the sports pages where I began to understand box scores and the frustration of being a Met fan.

I knew it was the summer of 1979 because that’s when Skylab fell to earth. I remember the breathless, dramatic buildup as the Day approached. Trying to scare us by not seeming to scare us, to keep those circulation numbers up because where would it fall??!! Turns out it broke apart in the atmosphere and littered the Australian outback (not Point Nemo), but let me tell you – I spent long nights worried and wondering if the roof of my house could keep out a hunk of metal the size of a school bus.

The other piece of drama the Daily News revealed that summer was the death of Lord Mountbatten. Now, I had no idea who he was or why he was assassinated, but I recall being filled with a deep, profound sadness after reading the article. I remember a picture of his yacht, pre-explosion, and one of post-explosion debris. Turns out he was an English World War II hero who went into politics and was killed by an IRA bomb on his boat. Doesn’t seem a fitting conclusion for such a life.

Thinking about it now, the subscription must have been a trial basis, because I don’t remember reading the newspaper after that summer. The big Iranian hostage crisis would have happened two months later, and my faithful informed friend was not at my side shrieking headlines at me every twenty-four hour news cycle.

Daily News, I enjoyed that little part of life we shared, that one summer, and in some small and not-so-small ways you expanded my horizons.