The way a particular day’s papers stack up delights me aesthetically. The repetition, color and horizontal lines just strike me as a pleasing abstraction of what a day’s work means at a newspaper. I think of this as the “barcode” of that day for some reason.

This picture is from the Spokesman closet of old papers I’ve been organizing, just for illustrative purposes. (The orange is from the day a fuel depot blew up last summer, by the way.)

When I was an editor at the Evergreen, one of my favorite parts of each day was walking into the basement of Murrow East toward the newsroom and seeing that day’s barcode in the stack of papers at the front counter. It was symbolic of that truth we both cherish and curse, that each day means a new paper and a new opportunity – to both do good things and make painful mistakes.

The web is far more fluid. There’s no do-or-die deadline, no daily packaging that says, “This is everything important that happened today. Check back tomorrow.” I never worked in a newsroom before the days of all-day anytime web updates, but I can still be nostalgic for it and see it represented in the daily barcode.

I like the aesthetic of a stack of newsprint, printed and folded and creased with a certain amount of necessary haphazardness. I like the slight variations in ink tone and registration that make each paper a unique imprint of the same information. I like the heavy, utilitarian feel of newsprint, just durable enough for its one-day lifespan and yellowed fragility in old age that makes you handle history like the memento mori that it is.

Pretty much anything is possible on the internet, but not that.