Turned out he was already at his office. He was the regional circulation manager for the Seattle Times. One of the guys down at the end of our dock takes the daily paper; it's usually sitting there when I go up in the morning, and this morning was no exception. Yesterday, apparently, he didn't get it, and the manager was down to check on the situation.
My first thought was, wow, that's service! A fifty cent paper gets a mid-level manager in a mileage-reimbursed SUV out to check on it the next day. I don't know what a subscription costs these days, but I can't imagine that service pays for itself... and as the Times man and I discussed, the print newspaper business isn't exactly rolling in dough these days.
He figured somebody had stolen it, and the paper(boy?man?woman? I've never seen who delivers it but somehow I doubt it's a scrappy teenager on a Schwinn these days) routinely shoves it far enough past the locked gate that if so, it had to have been someone on either P or Q docks. Actually, it could have been anyone with a marina key fob I think... I believe they work on all gates. Still, definitely someone who owns a boat here.
The manager couldn't believe that people who owned such big, expensive boats would need to stoop so low as to steal another man's paper. There's a machine just down the block! It's fifty cents! They can afford a $200,000 sailboat but not fifty cents for a paper?
While I can only dream that our boat held as much value as he imagined it must, the point was taken. We like to think of the marina as being pretty safe; a lot of people lock up neither boats nor dock boxes, and routinely leave rather expensive sailing gear out on deck or on docks without giving it a second thought. I know the marina is always warning people about this, but I don't know of anyone who has had anything stolen.
And yet, clearly, there is a paper thief among our ranks!
I felt bad for the guy from the Times. He says this isn't an infrequent occurrence, and I believe him. In fact, I doubt most people think of it as theft. For the same reason that fifty cents isn't a lot to pay for a paper, it also puts an inherently low value on the news, value that has been pushed ever lower with the advent of television and the Internet. To a lot of people, it isn't even worth fifty cents. Whoever took it probably didn't think of doing so as being much more foul than picking up any piece of scrap paper off the ground (although how one reconciles depriving a fellow boater of his ritual morning reading is another matter).
I felt even worse when he offered me a free paper after our talk and I turned him down. I read the Times online. Even there, though, I have to admit I don't value it much. Google News, to be honest, hits most of the top stories I might care about even regionally. And what I find more valuable are the hyper-local sites, the MyBallards, West Seattle Blogs, and even more finely tuned Three Sheets Northwests, that tell you the really interesting stuff that traditional papers have never managed to cover and can't manage even now that the technology is available to them. It's a sad fact that the market just doesn't bear the costs of printing and distributing a daily paper anymore, and that the value of traditional journalism in general has dropped as more and more people find the power of becoming information sources themselves, rather than relying on their hard-boiled daily reporters to come up with it.
It has to be tough to make that adjustment, and the man from the Times seemed a little melancholy as he drove away even on this fine spring morning.
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