JOURNALISTS often find it hard to throw away newspapers.
The swiftest glance around The Herald office is enough to reveal too many desks festering with newspapers, some of them a couple of months old; and, somewhere beneath them, the actual tool of the trade, a keyboard.
Papers such as these have their uses but we don't need to keep them, as all their contents go online. Still, old habits die hard. But the papers I like to rummage through are ones from decades ago.
Over the last few days I've been looking back at old Heralds, from the early 1920s and the early 1970s. The papers from May 1921, pored over on microfilm at the Mitchell Library, were especially fascinating: for the amazing number of reports they could cram into one broadsheet page; for their sober prose-style and their faithful, verbatim reports of speeches; for their vivid snapshots of the House of Commons (David Lloyd George was still in Number 10); for their quaint advertisements for quaint fashions in long-gone department stores; for their public notices urging people to cash in their War Bonds; and for their detailed reports of such incidents as the IRA ambush in Glasgow.
It's easy to get sidetracked from your original purpose as your eye is caught by one stray, antique paragraph or headline after another. But I like these old newspapers because of what they tell us about the world at the time, and how newspapers – and those readers who shared their daily paper's outlook– came to see it. It's a strange thought that these Herald readers of 1921, praying they would never again have to endure a world war, could not know that an even greater conflict was lying in wait for them, just 18 years down the line.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
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We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
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