front page news

When I was in elementary school (sixth grade) I had a job delivering newspapers. Kids, newspapers were like Yahoo! News handily pre-printed on paper, but instead of tapping on a story to read more, you turned pages that had a tendency to turn your fingers black thanks to a foul-smelling substance called "newsprint."

That's right: newspapers sucked. But I had a job delivering them, so every afternoon I would come home and take the few dozen copies of the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner that were brought by newspaper fairies to my house, fold each one up and put a rubber band around it, then hop on my bike and ride the six-mile roundtrip paper route I had. 

This being Orange County, there weren't a lot of folks interested in reading the the number-two Los Angeles paper, except those who had moved out to OC and wanted that little lifeline to their previous life in L.A. With so few customers, I got paid little.

That's right: paper routes sucked. Especially when it was cold or rainy, which was mercifully infrequent in Orange County, California. Santa Ana winds could slow me down, especially when they turned the half-empty delivery bags into mini-parachutes that made the ride feel like I was pedaling uphill. 

That's right: weather sucks. But the whole experience taught me discipline and the value of a dollar (years later, my fiancée would leave me because she thought I was the cheapest bastard she ever met; plus she was a closeted lesbian). And all that exercise also helped me dodge the bullet of childhood obesity, which managed to ensnare a lot of kids I went to school with.

That's right: Hostess snack foods and their insidious efforts to get kids to eat over-processed junk food sucks. Anyway, there was a point to all this. Ah, yes. Folding those papers gave me a chance to read the funnies, and then the front page out of boredom. I actually got into it, and I'd say that this experience got me into the news junkie habit. 

While living in Seoul in the late 1990s, I was anxious to get my hands on an Internet connection so I could start reading the newspapers I was missing back home, particularly the Orange County Register and the Los Angeles Times. Back in the day, the LAT actually had an option of letting you click on a link to see the front page as it would appear in the actual print addition. That was cool, because you got that old-school newspaper-reading experience, as best as could be reproduced on a computer screen. 

Sadly, the LAT got rid of that feature. But — and this is the point of the post — it is back. A handy website called Newseum has links to the front page of hundreds of newspapers in the United States and around the world, from major publications to local papers, including those in areas where one would assume literacy was too low to support a daily newspaper. Some are downloadable as pdf files. The Korean papers represented are all Korea-language periodicals, but in Japan there is the English-language Asahi Shimbun and the Pacific edition of the Stars & Stripes. 

The Internet does not suck.

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