{"id":60,"date":"2004-05-27T13:52:40","date_gmt":"2004-05-27T17:52:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/stepno\/2004\/05\/27\/for-some-reading-the-times-never-stops"},"modified":"2004-05-27T13:52:40","modified_gmt":"2004-05-27T17:52:40","slug":"for-some-reading-the-times-never-stops","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/stepno\/2004\/05\/27\/for-some-reading-the-times-never-stops\/","title":{"rendered":"For Some, Reading The Times Never Stops"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

with apologies to <\/span>Katie Hafner and the New York Times<\/a> <\/span>
\n(read her story before this one, or see the red disclamer at the bottom)<\/span><\/p>\n

TO celebrate four years of marriage, John Smith and his wife, Jane
\nJones, recently spent a week in Key West, Fla. Early on the morning of
\ntheir anniversary, Ms. Jones heard her husband get up and go into the
\nbathroom. He stayed there for a long time.<\/p>\n

“I didn’t hear any water running, so I wondered what was going on,” Ms.
\nJones said. When she knocked on the door, she found him seated with a
\ncopy of The New York Times<\/span> balanced on his knees, reading a collection
\nof observations about the world from a printed page.<\/p>\n

Newspaper reading is a pastime for many, even a livelihood for a few.
\nFor some, it becomes an obsession. Such readers often feel compelled to
\nread several times daily and feel anxious if they don’t keep up. As
\nthey spend more time hunkered over their papers, they neglect family,
\nfriends and jobs. They read at home, at work and on the road. They read
\nopenly or sometimes, like Mr. Smith, quietly so as not to call
\nattention to their habit.<\/p>\n

“It seems as if his paper is glued to his hands 24\/7,” Ms. Jones said of her husband.<\/p>\n

The number of Times<\/span> readers may even have grown thanks to sites like
\nnytimes.com, which makes it easy to read without actually paying for
\nthe paper or killing trees.<\/p>\n

Of course, even most of those paid subscriptions “papers” are abandoned
\nat Starbucks, thrown in the trash, recycled or, at best, read
\ninfrequently. For many readers, the novelty soon wears off and their
\npersistence fades.<\/p>\n

Sometimes, too, the realization that the reader is not thinking
\ncritically about what they read sets in. The Times<\/span> may have
\nthousands of readers, but never have so many people read so much and
\ndone so little with the information. By U.S. Census estimate, fewer
\nthan 50 percent of New Yorkers voted in the last presidential election,
\ncompared to greater than 60 percent in states outside the Times<\/span>‘
\nimmediate circulation area, such as Minnesota, Arkansas, Montana,
\nIowa, Oregon and North Dakota.<\/p>\n

“I’m just getting the news,” Mr. Smith said.<\/p>\n

Nor is he deterred by the fact that he toils for hours at a time at his
\nreading for no money. He gets satisfaction in other ways. <\/p>\n

“Sometimes
\nthere’s an ‘I told you so’ aspect to it,” he said.  Mr. Smith
\npoints with pride to Times<\/span> stories that agree with his prior
\nassumptions, such as a recent Katie Hafner story that portrayed webloggers as obsessive
\ngeeks<\/a>, or two years of “problematic articles” about Iraq “weapons of mass destruction” that The Times<\/span> has belatedly admitted were sometimes inadequately supported by
\nfacts.<\/a><\/p>\n

Bob Brown started reading the paper three years ago while in search of
\na distraction after breaking up with a girlfriend. “In three years, I
\ndon’t think I’ve missed a day,” he said.  <\/p>\n

Where some frequent readers might label themselves merely ardent,
\nMr. Smith is more realistic. “I wouldn’t call it dedicated, I would
\ncall it
\na problem,” he said. “If this were beer, I’d be an alcoholic.”<\/p>\n

Mr. Brown, who lives in Hollywood and works as a scheduler in the
\nentertainment industry, said reading began to feel like an addiction
\nwhen he noticed that he would rather be with his paper than with his
\ngirlfriend – for technical reasons.<\/p>\n

“She’s got a very small breakfast table that only holds magazines or
\ntabloids,” Mr. Brown said. When he is at his girlfriend’s house, he
\nfeels “antsy.” “We have little fights because I want to go home and
\nread my Times,” he said.<\/p>\n

Mr. Brown described the rush he gets from what he called “the fix”
\nprovided by his paper. “The pleasure response is twofold,” he said. “You
\ncan have instant gratification; you’re going to hear about something
\nreally good or bad instantly. And if I feel like I’ve read something
\ngood, it’s enjoyable to go back and read it again.”<\/p>\n

And, he said, “like most addictions, those feelings go away quickly. So I have to do it again and again.”<\/p>\n

John Q. Public, 26, a graduate student at the School of Information
\nManagement and Systems at the University of California at Berkeley who
\nhas studied newspaper readers, said that for some people reading has
\nsupplanted e-mail as a way to procrastinate at work. <\/p>\n

People like Mr. Brown, who devote much of their free time to the newspaper, do so
\nlargely because it makes them feel productive even if it is not a
\npaying job.<\/p>\n

The procrastination, said J. Fred Muggs, 31, a fellow graduate student
\nwith Mr. Public, has a collective feel to it. “You feel like you’re
\nparticipating in something important, because we’re all doing it
\ntogether,” he said.<\/p>\n

(The two graduate students’ actual research may be available somewhere
\nin print or online or  may be published in a dissertation years
\nfrom now… You’ll have to trust them. Or trust us.  Or go use
\nGoogle to find out what they actually studied, and how they reached
\ntheir conclusions. We don’t want to bother you with details or weblinks
\nto them.)<\/p>\n

Others find they are distracted to the point of neglectfulness. Bob
\nStepno, when teaching at a college in Boston, admits he
\noccasionally showed up “considerably late” for events and put off more
\nthan a few work-related calls to tend to his newspaper.<\/p>\n

He characterizes the newspaper way of life as a routine rather than an
\nobsession. “It’s a habit,” he said. “What you’re really doing is
\nsearching for something that you might find interesting. When that
\nbecomes part of your life, when you start thinking in ‘news,’ it
\nbecomes part of you.”<\/p>\n

Suffering from a form of “news fatigue,” Mr. Stepno simply stopped
\naltogether after four years of nearly constant newspaper reading.<\/p>\n

“It was starting to feel like work, and it was never supposed to be a
\njob,” Mr. Stepno said. “It was supposed to be an anti-job.”<\/p>\n

Even with some 200 papers stacked in his living room, he has not opened one since last Tuesday.<\/p>\n

Still, Mr. Stepno said, he does not rule out a return to reading someday.<\/p>\n

“There is this seductive thing that happens, this kind of
\nsnowball-rolling-down-a-hill thing, where the sheer momentum becomes
\nvery keenly felt,” he said. “And the absence of reading feels like – I
\ndon’t know, laziness or something.”<\/p>\n

\n

Please don’t believe everything you read on the Web or in the newspaper. <\/span><\/p>\n

The names have
\nbeen changed to mostly fictitious ones and quotes have been adjusted
\nslightly to make people laugh at the preconceived notions, unscientific
\ngeneralizations and lack of rigorous  research by Ms. Hafner in
\nher May 27, 2004, story “For Some, the Blogging Never Stops<\/a>.”<\/span>
\nIt’s probably unfair to suggest too much of a parallel between the lazy
\nsourcing (two grad students as expert researchers) in her generally
\namusing story about bloggers and the less amusing Iraq stories The Times<\/span> is now scrutinizing to see when and where they went wrong<\/a>. For more opinions on where Ms. Hafner went wrong, see Bloglines collection of links referring to her story<\/a>.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

with apologies to Katie Hafner and the New York Times (read her story before this one, or see the red disclamer at the bottom) TO celebrate four years of marriage, John Smith and his wife, Jane Jones, recently spent a week in Key West, Fla. Early on the morning of their anniversary, Ms. Jones heard […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1090,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1391],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stepnostories"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/stepno\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/stepno\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/stepno\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/stepno\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1090"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/stepno\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/stepno\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/stepno\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/stepno\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/stepno\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}