I hardly ever buy a daily paper these days, but I still have something of a weekend paper habit. And, even with my brand-new iPhone 3gs to play with, I grabbed a paper and have been devouring it on my journey from Halesworth to London. I'm finding it hard to articulate quite why, possibly because it's an emotional and tactile decision as much as a rational one. The weekend papers evoke the lazy, quiet Sundays of my youth, and the big pages and big pictures are somehow more engrossing than the iPhone screen.
But is this just nostalgia, a transitory state only inhabited by those of us old enough to have grown up in the pre-Internet age?
Reading a newspaper doesn't wear your battery down, either.
I fear it's nostalgia. Like you I hardly ever buy a daily paper, but when I do buy papers (mostly weekends) I treasure being able to sit down and enjoy them with a cup of coffee or tea.
It feels like a luxury; taking the time to sit down and actually read papers at a leisurely pace. It's partly a throwback to when a late mentor of mine would bring along all the Sunday papers and we'd read thru them over brunch at a quiet North London cafe: him - a former financial PR - analysing the stories for who were likely to have spun them;-)(ah, here's a hallmark alan parker, max clifford, xx story, it's got his fingerprints all over it..)
Partly a throwback to earlier newpaper reading memories of starting the day with papers over breakfast, which I always did before I left home - a habit I copied from my father.
However, my eight year younger sister never acquired any such newspaper reading habits. She never took to reading them while growing up, nor has she started doing so later. I think the idea of spending a leisurly Saturday or Sunday noon bent of the papers would be very foreign to her, more something she'd associate with boredom than with luxury. She'd be much more likely to relax with a bit of Facebook-softing, the latest TV-downloads or perhaps reading - but then it would be a book, not a newspaper.
The fact is that Sunday papers still offer a huge amount of analysis that people simply would not/do not read online.
I can't imagine anyone sitting down at any time during the week to read that type and volume of information off a screen.
Sunday papers hold a strong position because it is the one time of the week when people do have time to read, and they offer the best medium with which to deliver the information.
nice thing about papers on trains is you can leave them behind for someone else to read for free. I always check cos there's always a lot of the London Paper on the evening train fron LLS by the time it reaches Sax.