When I first read today’s question — “What’s something you do completely differently from how you were raised?” — I had a hard time coming up with an answer.
There are probably a lot of things I do differently. The world is different. Technology is different. The way we communicate is different. The way we shop, watch television, listen to music and find information would have seemed like science fiction when I was growing up.
But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the important things really haven’t changed very much.
I was raised to believe that faith mattered, and I still do. I go to church every week. I’m involved there. My faith isn’t something I left behind when I became an adult or something I pull out when life gets difficult. It remains central to who I am.
Family mattered when I was growing up, and it still does. My Mom was an extremely involved grandmother. My Dad wasn’t nearly as much, but Mom wanted to be part of everything she could be part of. I understand that now in a way I probably didn’t then. I love being involved in Sully’s and Aurelia’s lives as much as geography and circumstances allow. I don’t want to be the grandfather they vaguely remember seeing at Christmas. I want to know them, and I want them to know me.
So in the things that matter most, I’m probably not terribly different from how I was raised.
But there is one area where I am. I don’t consume news the way I did growing up. That bothers me.
I was raised in a newspaper family, and newspapers weren’t just something that happened to arrive on the driveway every morning. They were part of life. You read the newspaper because knowing what was happening mattered.
And I still have tremendous reverence for news. I still believe an informed person ought to know what is happening locally, nationally and around the world. But I don’t read a daily newspaper anymore. I wish I did.
The problem is that newspapers have become difficult to justify financially. You pay far more than you once did and frequently get far less newspaper. I would gladly subscribe to a daily paper if the price made sense, but somewhere along the way the newspaper industry seems to have decided that declining advertising revenue should be replaced by charging the remaining subscribers more and more.
My Dad understood newspapers as both journalism and business, and he was very successful at it. I think he understood something that today’s newspaper bean counters sometimes seem to miss: circulation has value.
Sell more newspapers and you have more readers. Have more readers and advertisers have more reason to buy space. Charge fewer people increasingly high subscription prices and eventually you have fewer readers, which makes the newspaper less attractive to advertisers, which means you have to charge the remaining readers even more.
That doesn’t strike me as a particularly promising circle. And somewhere in that cycle, they lost people like me. That matters because reading a newspaper was different from getting news online.
When you opened a newspaper, you discovered things you didn’t know you were interested in. You read the front page and then turned it. You encountered local stories, national stories, international stories, editorials, business news, sports and features simply because they were there.
Online, we tend to click what catches our attention. Algorithms learn what we like. Social media sends us what somebody else thinks will interest us. We can know more about the subjects we already care about while remaining completely unaware of subjects we never thought to search for.
I’m not convinced that’s progress.
So maybe my answer to today’s question is that I get my news completely differently from the way I was raised. But I’m not proud of that difference.
Some changes happen because we decide there is a better way. Others happen because the old way becomes too expensive, inconvenient or simply unavailable. Sometimes we leave something behind without ever deciding we wanted to leave it.
I still value being informed just as much as I was taught to value it growing up. I just miss the newspaper that used to help me do it.
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Copyright © 2026 Doug DeBolt.
