Bob Sanders: The old way of getting news was better

I worry about magazines and newspapers. I like the way they used to be.

Why? Because it was better that way. And that’s not dreaming about the past. Take Birmingham. For decades, it had three daily newspapers, each with a particular point of view. There was the morning Age-Herald and the afternoon News and Post. Every day. The gray News and Age-Herald, and the bright, readable Post.

Grandma took the Age-Herald. So I could read the funnies in it when I got off the scool bus, then hurry home and read the funnies in our Post. Later, I began to read the columns, etc.
Auburn was in a wonderful position. For years, newsstands offered a morning and an afternoon paper from Atlanta, Birmingham, Columbus, and Montgomery, eight papers a day, not even to mention the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Opelika-Auburn News, a newspaper lover’s heaven.

Then things began to fall apart. The Post merged with the Age-Herald to become the Post-Herald. But that was only the beginning. About three decades later, for some reason — I cannot for the life of me understand why — afternoon papers began to die. The Alabama Journal (Montgomery’s afternoon paper) dropped by the wayside, as did the Post-Herald (with the News becoming a morning paper). The Atlanta afternoon paper essentially died, and the afternoon Opelika-Auburn News became a morning paper.
From several big city dailies to four. What a pity. Hey! I miss y’all.

And magazines ain’t what they used to be. There were weekly general audience magazines, notably Collier’s and the Saturday Evening Post. Aunt Tennie, one of the Birmingham aunts, would come down to Grandpa’s about twice a year with a stack of mint-condition Collier’s. After Grandpa and Grandma finished with them, they’d pass them along to us. What joy! And after we moved into the new house, we subscribed to the Saturday Evening Post. It always had two serials running. Often, one of them would be a western, by, maybe, Ernest Haycox or Luke Short. Some were made into movies, like “The Searchers” with John Wayne, and “Dark Passage” with Humphrey Bogart. There’d be two or three short stories, plus articles about anything, plus a page of funny stories, and wonderful cartoons. Collier’s was similar.

They disappeared.

There have always been specialty magazines, but they’ve changed, too. For hunting and fishing fans, there were the Big Three, always had been there and always would be — Field & Stream, Outdoor Life, and Sports Afield. Each had a staff of rock-solid specialists, and just some hard down excellent writers. F&S, to pick one, had regular columns by Corey Ford and Robert Ruark and Ted Trueblood and Ed Zern.

F&S was owned by one company, Outdoor Life by another, and Sports Afield by another. Now, who knows who publishes what. For a while, F&S and Outdoor Life were published by the same company, which seems conflicting, and Sports Afield has apparently dropped out of the running, at least I can’t find it in the book store.

It’s a mess. This is another case where there’s no doubt about it, the old way was definitely better.

Bob Sanders is a longtime radio personality with WAUD and writes a column for the Opelika-Auburn News.