Newspapers

Deadline approaches at the Philadelphia Gay News in the same frantic way as at any other newspaper. The office is cramped and messy, and people get in each other's way. Reporters wait until the last minute to file their stories. The editors wonder when that photograph for page one is going appear. And the publisher is upstairs squawking about budget overruns. This is only the third issue of PGN, as the weekly paper is known, that new editor John Mandes has sent to press, but he's already familiar with the drill.

As newspaper companies try to turn themselves around in a brutal economy, under huge debt loads, and amid increasingly funereal media coverage, it's worth looking at the behavior and motives of some of the industry's harshest critics. Time magazine, which is struggling for its own survival in the hemorrhaging newsweekly marketplace, recently published an article on its Web site titled "The 10 Most Endangered Newspapers in America," which hundreds of news outlets around the world ran under the headline "What Newspapers Will Die in 2009?"

On a day when more than 11 million Americans were out of work, I found a job. Considering the economy, it was a crowning achievement. But, sadly, it meant leaving my longtime profession, newspaper journalism. Still, I was ready - and so was it. What had once been a worthy and satisfying business was in eclipse. My departure meant a slight but welcome improvement to a woeful bottom line. I did not work for the paper you are now reading, but it and all papers are facing similar fiscal trials.

Miranda Frost, inspired by her award-winning sister and eager to share her love of reading, created a drawing that was distributed in newspapers across the country last month. Her drawing appeared on the cover of an educational literacy supplement produced by the Newspaper Association of America Foundation. About 200 newspapers carried the supplement, including The Inquirer, which circulated 28,000 copies to area students. The artwork depicted an Indiana Jones character in a cave carrying a newspaper as a torch.

Jack Merves, 94, a hardworking newspaper peddler once dubbed "Newsboy to the Millionaires," died Wednesday at the Philadelphia Geriatric Center. For 67 years, Mr. Merves sold newspapers six days a week from his newsstand at the corner of Fifth and Chestnut Streets. The youngest of seven children, Mr. Merves had come to Philadelphia from Lithuania when he was about 5. He attended Horace Binney Elementary School, but left at age 10 to sell newspapers. From the southeast corner of Fifth and Chestnut, he hawked The Inquirer, the Record, the Bulletin, the Ledger and the Daily News with shouts of "Extra!

Back among the stacks of the Burlington County Library, in a room behind a half-door, lies a treasure trove of history. Rows and rows of boxes line the walls. Each box contains a microfilm spool of an old newspaper from Burlington County. News from 50, 100 and 150 years ago - it is all there in the Newspaper Research Archives. Births, deaths, fires and floods are recorded on microfilm for historians, genealogists, and the just plain curious. The archives contain microfilm copies of more than 30 Burlington County newspapers, such as the Rural Visitor, which was published from 1810 to 1811.

The Mattson siblings, Joan, 62, and Les, 65, remember when there was a movie theater at Bank and Delaware Streets called the Boro Theatre. They also remember when former Paulsboro Mayor James A. Wert, who held office in the late '30s, had newlyweds sign a rolling pin before leaving the old borough hall on Broad Street. Memories like these flowed as freely as the fruit punch last weekend as the newly renovated Gill Memorial Library held an open house. In addition to getting a new parking lot and a fresh coat of paint last summer, the library has been rearranged to include even more Paulsboro memorabilia.

Prince Valiant may be a mere newspaper comic-strip character, but in his heyday, he commanded such popularity that the (fictional) birth of his first son, Arn, on Aug. 30, 1947, made the (real) birth-announcement columns in hundreds of papers across the country. Prince Valiant, a Sunday strip launched in 1937 by the great Canadian-born illustrator Hal Foster (1892-1982), continues to have a fiercely loyal - if aging - following after nearly three-quarters of a century. But its future is less than certain given the economic woes and changing readership of newspapers.

Somehow, in the carpeted basement of this comfortable home, downstairs from the wicker porch furniture and the seclusion of the street outside, the quiet feels unnatural. The insulated, dehumidified hush - broken now and then by the mild jingle of the phone - seems an eerie contrast to the silent din blaring from the walls, the shelves and the steel-roofed vault of Timothy J. Hughes' remarkable subterranean world. For, from every quarter of his basement bellows word of calamity, news of upheaval, report of sensation: Lincoln Slain!

During the 1985 Inquirer and Daily News strike, a local television reporter told my students how funny it was to watch her higher-ups scurrying to find out what was happening in the city. "Without the morning paper to tell them what's news each day," she confided, "they're lost. " The reporter may have been exaggerating, but not by much. With all the money spent on anchor salaries and technological advances, there is surprisingly little left over to fund the actual search for news.