Bob Stepno's Red Liner

with apologies to Katie Hafner and the New York Times
(read her story before this one, or see the red disclamer at the bottom)

TO celebrate four years of marriage, John Smith and his wife, Jane
Jones, recently spent a week in Key West, Fla. Early on the morning of
their anniversary, Ms. Jones heard her husband get up and go into the
bathroom. He stayed there for a long time.

“I didn’t hear any water running, so I wondered what was going on,” Ms.
Jones said. When she knocked on the door, she found him seated with a
copy of The New York Times balanced on his knees, reading a collection
of observations about the world from a printed page.

Newspaper reading is a pastime for many, even a livelihood for a few.
For some, it becomes an obsession. Such readers often feel compelled to
read several times daily and feel anxious if they don’t keep up. As
they spend more time hunkered over their papers, they neglect family,
friends and jobs. They read at home, at work and on the road. They read
openly or sometimes, like Mr. Smith, quietly so as not to call
attention to their habit.

“It seems as if his paper is glued to his hands 24/7,” Ms. Jones said of her husband.

The number of Times readers may even have grown thanks to sites like
nytimes.com, which makes it easy to read without actually paying for
the paper or killing trees.

Of course, even most of those paid subscriptions “papers” are abandoned
at Starbucks, thrown in the trash, recycled or, at best, read
infrequently. For many readers, the novelty soon wears off and their
persistence fades.

Sometimes, too, the realization that the reader is not thinking
critically about what they read sets in. The Times may have
thousands of readers, but never have so many people read so much and
done so little with the information. By U.S. Census estimate, fewer
than 50 percent of New Yorkers voted in the last presidential election,
compared to greater than 60 percent in states outside the Times‘
immediate circulation area, such as Minnesota, Arkansas, Montana,
Iowa, Oregon and North Dakota.

“I’m just getting the news,” Mr. Smith said.

Nor is he deterred by the fact that he toils for hours at a time at his
reading for no money. He gets satisfaction in other ways.

“Sometimes
there’s an ‘I told you so’ aspect to it,” he said.  Mr. Smith
points with pride to Times stories that agree with his prior
assumptions, such as a recent Katie Hafner story that portrayed webloggers as obsessive
geeks, or two years of “problematic articles” about Iraq “weapons of mass destruction” that The Times has belatedly admitted were sometimes inadequately supported by
facts.

Bob Brown started reading the paper three years ago while in search of
a distraction after breaking up with a girlfriend. “In three years, I
don’t think I’ve missed a day,” he said.  

Where some frequent readers might label themselves merely ardent,
Mr. Smith is more realistic. “I wouldn’t call it dedicated, I would
call it
a problem,” he said. “If this were beer, I’d be an alcoholic.”

Mr. Brown, who lives in Hollywood and works as a scheduler in the
entertainment industry, said reading began to feel like an addiction
when he noticed that he would rather be with his paper than with his
girlfriend – for technical reasons.

“She’s got a very small breakfast table that only holds magazines or
tabloids,” Mr. Brown said. When he is at his girlfriend’s house, he
feels “antsy.” “We have little fights because I want to go home and
read my Times,” he said.

Mr. Brown described the rush he gets from what he called “the fix”
provided by his paper. “The pleasure response is twofold,” he said. “You
can have instant gratification; you’re going to hear about something
really good or bad instantly. And if I feel like I’ve read something
good, it’s enjoyable to go back and read it again.”

And, he said, “like most addictions, those feelings go away quickly. So I have to do it again and again.”

John Q. Public, 26, a graduate student at the School of Information
Management and Systems at the University of California at Berkeley who
has studied newspaper readers, said that for some people reading has
supplanted e-mail as a way to procrastinate at work.

People like Mr. Brown, who devote much of their free time to the newspaper, do so
largely because it makes them feel productive even if it is not a
paying job.

The procrastination, said J. Fred Muggs, 31, a fellow graduate student
with Mr. Public, has a collective feel to it. “You feel like you’re
participating in something important, because we’re all doing it
together,” he said.

(The two graduate students’ actual research may be available somewhere
in print or online or  may be published in a dissertation years
from now… You’ll have to trust them. Or trust us.  Or go use
Google to find out what they actually studied, and how they reached
their conclusions. We don’t want to bother you with details or weblinks
to them.)

Others find they are distracted to the point of neglectfulness. Bob
Stepno, when teaching at a college in Boston, admits he
occasionally showed up “considerably late” for events and put off more
than a few work-related calls to tend to his newspaper.

He characterizes the newspaper way of life as a routine rather than an
obsession. “It’s a habit,” he said. “What you’re really doing is
searching for something that you might find interesting. When that
becomes part of your life, when you start thinking in ‘news,’ it
becomes part of you.”

Suffering from a form of “news fatigue,” Mr. Stepno simply stopped
altogether after four years of nearly constant newspaper reading.

“It was starting to feel like work, and it was never supposed to be a
job,” Mr. Stepno said. “It was supposed to be an anti-job.”

Even with some 200 papers stacked in his living room, he has not opened one since last Tuesday.

Still, Mr. Stepno said, he does not rule out a return to reading someday.

“There is this seductive thing that happens, this kind of
snowball-rolling-down-a-hill thing, where the sheer momentum becomes
very keenly felt,” he said. “And the absence of reading feels like – I
don’t know, laziness or something.”

Please don’t believe everything you read on the Web or in the newspaper.

The names have
been changed to mostly fictitious ones and quotes have been adjusted
slightly to make people laugh at the preconceived notions, unscientific
generalizations and lack of rigorous  research by Ms. Hafner in
her May 27, 2004, story “For Some, the Blogging Never Stops.”
It’s probably unfair to suggest too much of a parallel between the lazy
sourcing (two grad students as expert researchers) in her generally
amusing story about bloggers and the less amusing Iraq stories The Times is now scrutinizing to see when and where they went wrong. For more opinions on where Ms. Hafner went wrong, see Bloglines collection of links referring to her story.