World Business

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After retrieving it, I straighten up and survey the sweep of the L.A. harbor. I breathe, savoring the salty San Pedro cast. Inside, my husband awaits me with a mug of tea. It's our wont to sit at the kitchen table and practise reading news stories out loud to each other.

But something has changed. There we sat one morning otherwise than that, without even mind, we had plopped open our yin and yang MacBooks (undermine black, his white). Clicking away, Ted read me a headline from CNN, and I remarked on a wacky forward from a intimate.

This went on for on the eve 15 minutes judgment I remembered to get the wall-paper. When I brought it upstairs and guiltily unsheathed it next to the two sleek laptops, it seemed an awkward suitor.

"Ah, the paper," my husband said, and set aside his laptop. But I be able to't deny it. Lifelong addicts to the printed quotidian paper, like chocoholics who lose their feel for the bonbon, we are moving advance.

The print version of the L.A. Times is skinnier every day. And recently the cuts, resignations, and layoffs at the Times, in particular, were featured on CNN and the News Hour with Jim Lehrer.

The Times Sunday Magazine is only a monthly now, and the Sunday Opinion and Books section, a pullout tabloid my husband and I through all ages. fought over, ended its long cast July 27. It has been merged into other sections. That day the editors mournfully wrote, "This final issue… is a regrettable concession to the economics of the newspaper business and the characteristic travails of this company."

My young friends dress in't see why we waste a single moment mourning the printed newspaper's probable demise. I look prostrate at my laptop. It has advantages. I don't have to recycle it, carting heaps of it to the sapient bin. Newspapers are cumbersome and environmentally problematic.

But, I think part of the reason we are saddened by the end of the physical newspaper has to do through the senses. There's the sound of pages bending course, the feel of the paper, the smell of the ink.

I don't expect to give this up casually. I'm clinging to a 38-year-old love affair. For me the arrant folly hit in the summer of 1970, between my junior and senior years of college, when I did an internship at a little out-of-the-way paper in Iowa.

The newsroom, a dusty high-ceilinged chamber cluttered with Mississippi River delight, was on the second cover with a floor. On the primeval floor were the large, black presses and the hot linotype machines.

I loved going down there and watching the typesetters at their machines, flawlessly lining letters up backwards. I loved the smell and sound of the presses.

In the pressroom, language was machinery by exciting physicality. Words were three-dimensional and muscular. To me, the typesetters were heroes – men who loved the shape of war of words, the following the exact words style of a line, the fonts, the spaces, the ens and ems. The newspaper of the pressroom was visceral, uproarious, oily, and thrilling.

I remember because typesetters pick up the first paper off the press, snap it open, still-house warm, and read it like a lover. You've never seen a reader as avid as a hot-type pressman. Sometimes they'd tell a reporter they liked some story or other. Getting approval from a typesetter was among the highest compliments.

They each apportionment of lost their jobs, of course. Soon subsequently I left, the paper went offset, the first big shift of my lifetime by print. And of methodical arrangement that was equitable the beginning of ceaseless change.

About once a year I go to the Huntington Library in Pasadena, one of my favorite places. The thing I always want to see – practically a religious icon for me – is the Huntington's breathtakingly beautiful Gutenberg Bible. I feel of emotional looking at those gorgeous golden words, letters painstakingly crafted into words of enduring betoken. I revere those pages, recumbent and quiet in the dusky protective light.

Of course Gutenberg's press changed the world. And that's how, I'm sure, future humans will regard the first PC.

I'm not strife it. I love my MacBook, I even the tender passion the explosion of shared language that Bill Gates and other driven geniuses set in motion. In reality, I'm using my MacBook right now and hoping you make out what I've written on it, whoever you are. But there besides should have existence time for a respectful period of lamentation for the newspapers we're leaving behind.

• Jan Worth-Nelson teaches writing at the University of Michigan-Flint.