make newspapers cool again!

romanticising the physical new york times? ok!

One thing about me? I’m a ‘hold it in my hands’ girlie. I like to read physical magazines rather than read a stray New Yorker link and I’ve never dabbled in audio or e-books because I like turning the page of a novel myself. But although my first ever job was delivering the local newspaper, by the time I was old enough to give a shit about what was in it my family had cancelled our daily subscription because reading a physical newspaper just wasn’t a thing you did anymore.

This isn’t going to be a chronicle of how things changed (you can just look at Shit You Should Care About’s move from blog, to Instagram, to newsletters and podcasts in the space of three years if you want to see how quickly our habits are evolving), or how bad it was for us that things changed (see: the clickbait era and the everything-I-want-to-read-is-paywalled era) but rather a suggestion: that we make newspapers cool again.

I sorta thought I was alone in my yearning to bring back the physical news until I came across Kelsey Russell on TikTok. Kelsey had just been gifted a physical New York Times subscription for her 23rd birthday and decided to start reading aloud what she’d learnt to her followers.

@kelscrusslike I knew about da bombs but the cluster bomblets?!??! #fyp #syrian #newyorktimes #ukraine #russia

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As it turns out, the girlies are loving it:

Naturally, I reached out to Kelsey (because duuuh) and asked her what it was that got her into (or back into) reading the newspaper and why she wanted to start documenting it.

Kelsey, who’s currently studying a Masters in Sociology and Education with a Policy Concentration at Teachers College, Columbia University, credits her Dad for inspiring her to get back into the physical news:

“My dad religiously flips through the newspaper every morning with three boiled eggs, and he used to toss me the Atlanta Journal Constitution metro and comic section to read in elementary school. When we moved to a new house he added a New York Times Subscription. He would not shut up about the amazing stories being covered, and physically mailed me articles all throughout undergrad college.”

BUT, being the self-aware Gen Zer that she is, she also said that “vanity and ego” piqued her interest in getting it delivered.

“I was on a quest to feel ~different~ lmao.”

As well as helping her feel ✨different,✨ Kelsey reckons that reading the physical newspaper each day has helped her with that looming feeling of "ohmyfuckinggodwhatthefuckisgoingoninthewordwhatthefuckismylife" and flipped her anxieties into a “desire to know and learn about what is going on” so she can live her life accordingly.

“Long story short I was looking for a way to not be such a basic bitch and it ended up being one of the healthiest decisions of my life.”

And damn, I get this. Not to get all ‘therapy speak’ on you, but there’s something about a boundaried consumption of news that feels healthy, and almost - necessary - these days. A lot of people were fucked up by the post-2020 doom scroll revolution and remedied it by ‘tapping out’ completely (which actually meant that instead of seeking the news out from trusted sources, they were unwillingly served it on social media from… anyone.) While I understand the desire to ‘tap out,’ it’s also SUCH a privilege to be able to do that, so incorporating a daily newspaper (or a newsletter, to be fair) into your routine to give you a boundaried digest of stories that won’t leave you feeling like shit feels like a pretty good option to me!? (Also, there are puzzles.)

In one of her videos, Kelsey made an observation that’s stuck with me. While she was reading an article about Ecuador, she noted that it could have been strengthened by explaining to the audience what a snap election was, saying: “let's not write to read people out.” This sentiment is basically at the core of what we try to do at Shit You Should Care About (by avoiding using lofty or pretentious words that no one understands) and is something I’m going to be quoting FOREVER now, so I asked her about it specifically. She told me that it loosely comes from author Mara Shalhoup, who wrote the book “BMF: The Rise and Fall of Big Meech and the Black Mafia Family” at a reading level that allowed almost anyone to read and understand the history.

“Listen, we live in a super rich country [America] with some of the greatest socioeconomic disparities, that have resulted in an overall lack of investment in education, literacy, and overall critical thinking. Shalhoub's decision to write at a 3rd grade level to not "write to read people out" is a direct response to the reality we live in...people can't read.

But also, as any good educator, lifelong learner, and equitable academic knows... if you can't communicate information in a manner that the person with the least knowledge has, then you didn't communicate the information well.”

A moment for that last quote plz: “if you can't communicate information in a manner that the person with the least knowledge has, then you didn't communicate the information well.”

Last year, when I was asked to speak on a podcast about why younger audiences are ‘slipping away from traditional media’ I basically echoed exactly what Kelsey is saying here. It feels like we have brilliant researchers and scientists at the top of the funnel, and writers and reporters who have been trained to communicate in a way that reaches millennials at a stretch, but traditional news outlets often write for an audience who all grew up learning similar histories and consuming lots of the same media, and often assume that we all have a shared understanding or context of a story.

The fact is though, these days, because what we consume and learn online is so fractured, and we’ve all got different levels of education, a lot of people (including Gen Z and Gen Alpha) have grown up with completely different reading and listening habits from each other, so it simply can’t be assumed that we all have the same context when we’re reading a story. So yeah - while we should make newspapers cool again, we should also maybe make them make sense for the generations to come.

It strikes me, as I’m writing this, that if I spent less time scrolling and writing love letters to physical newspapers I could try to solve these problems by starting our own one, but because there’s only so many hours in a day, for now I just hope my algo keeps serving me up people like Kelsey to keep me inspired on this weird mission of making the news ✨chic.✨

Find Kelsey on TikTok here! xx