Mark Twain commented that “people who can read, but don’t, have no advantage over those who can’t. Both are functionally illiterate. Sadly, too many people I know seem to fall into the “can but don’t” camp. Great as the age of instantaneous electronic communication is, it also contributes to the dumbing down of America.

Perhaps its saddest legacy is killing or mortally wounding America’s once glorious newspapers.

Today’s news shows up in tomorrow’s newspaper. A quip states that a lie is halfway around the world while truth is still putting its boots on. There’s an analogy with news. Electronic news shows up on our TV, iPad or smartphone while the police are still stringing the yellow tape. If it shows up in print at all, it’s a day — or days — later.

As a 70-year addict to printed news, I’ve seen the unrelenting hemorrhage of paid advertisement. As these revenues shrink, so do newspaper staff. And as coverage disappears, so do readers. Fifty years ago, The Sentinel building was a journalistic beehive. A reporter or stringer covered every meeting of public councils, commissions, boards or committees. And not just for Holland and Zeeland, but for our urbanized townships as well.

In the journalistic heyday of the mid-1980s, The Grand Rapids Press not only published a Lakeshore Edition but had a bureau staffed with reporters and a distribution warehouse on East Eighth Street. The office building is long gone, but the corner gazebo across from the depot and the warehouse across from the Windmill Island entrance are legacies of their once-proud presence.

Few of us saw in those glory years that the infant internet born in 1983 would roll over a century of communication traditions like a tsunami. Wristwatches aren’t on wrists. Cameras aren’t on a strap around our neck. They have joined our telephones, news sources, alarm clocks, music collections, photo galleries, mailboxes, GPS, recipe books and entertainment channels. And these all get carried in our hip pocket in a little package slightly bigger than a deck of cards.

We are fortunate that The Sentinel, now part of the behemoth Gannett empire is still published.

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Many hometown papers have folded. Imagine living in total ignorance of the political, managerial and financial fiasco in Ottawa County. Without The Sentinel — without a written source of information — we’d be oblivious that ours is one of the worst mismanaged county governments in the nation. Even with the blessing of journalistic eyes on the community, ignorance abounds. Sentinel daily circulation just tops 4,400. There are probably 44,000 households in the Holland/Zeeland metropolitan area, if you read The Sentinel, nine of our neighbors apparently don’t. There’s a skinny boundary between “don’t read” and “can’t read.”

Both spell ignorance.

And the future is bleak. In 2019, the Gannett empire included 261 daily papers and 302 weekly papers. By 2022, those numbers had dropped to 217 daily and 175 weekly papers. A drop of 171 papers. Put some of the blame on the pandemic, but save some for apathy as well. A lot of our friends and neighbors (and relatives) just don’t want to devote effort to being informed. They’d rather just watch a screen and live on sound bites.

I don’t know where this sorry scenario is taking us, but I have absolute confidence in one thing: It isn’t greatness.

— Community Columnist Dale Wyngarden is a resident of the city of Holland. He can be reached at wyngarden@ameritech.net.