Brian Fuller’s blog on the state of media and communications

It’s the habit (and a lot more)

Posted on | October 9, 2007 | No Comments

I started writing this post by searching out the old Hamm’s beer jingle line: “It’s the water and a lot more.” Then I wondered why the hell I was going to quote it. I remembered my old man up at the cabin with a Hamm’s in the heat of an August day. While, later, I realized that Hamm’s was crap, it will forever be associated (to me) with a refreshing, cold midsummer’s lager. So the jingle popped into my mind as I’m about to emerge out of my non-newspaper funk of the past couple of months. The summer’s not a bad time to let your Wall Street Journal sub lapse or your S.F. Chronicle sub lapse, especially when you’re ticked off at the latter. But it’s the fall and it’s time to get serious again. As much as I’ve tried in my new gig with a new schedule to rely more on the time-tested digital-news methods I’ve used for years, it ain’t the same as the “habit.” The newspaper-reading habit.

I surrender, man. My mornings just suck without the morning paper. It’s like a bad relationship with a beautiful woman (or man, if you’re a woman): half of it fantastically exciting, the other half trending toward the bone-rattlingly disturbing.

Still, I want to awaken before dawn, make the coffee, let it steep in the press for five minutes and pad out to the street to pick up a paper or two. I have ALWAYS gotten a thrill out of seeing, at first light or before, what’s on the front page, the bigger the stories the better. In college when we were all out until ungodly hours, I got a rise as a freshman coming back to my dorm room to see the day’s issue of the L.A. Times at our door. Not only did it tell me the day was afoot (sometimes I had to be reminded!), but it told me everything else I needed to know.
Now my work life is so busy and not necessarily news focused that I have to have that time in the morning, and I’ll get up earlier if I have to to carve it out. I need to be armed before I head out into the world. TV? I get to the health club to work out and it’s recipes and traffic and weather. Blech. Tonight, I end up stuck in a monumental traffic jam on the way home tonight over the Golden Gate Bridge listening to the same 60-second stories on KCBS. Over and over. I love KCBS. They’re fabulous professionals, but their job is to update me now; not help set my expectations and fill in the color slots.
It’s the habit. It’s the habit, and a lot more. How can you begin to be an informed citizen without it?

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Related posts:

  1. The newspaper habit
  2. The Reading Habit
  3. The morning routine
  4. Black Friday at the S.F. Chronicle
  5. The Sunday paper

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  1. Anonymous
    July 31st, 2008 @ 12:58 am

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