Dear Mom, one more column for the scrapbook

If something were in the newspaper, it didn’t just mean the moment was important, it meant we were important. It also meant that my mother was able to create an immense family archive of our lives, each page and scrap of newsprint a reminder of who we were, and that we were here.

When I think about the incredibly emotional response I’ve gotten from readers to the news the AJC will stop the print edition of the newspaper at the end of this year, I think it’s that sense of importance that people see slipping away, too, both newspapers’ importance and maybe even their own.

Like my mom, I have a pile of newspapers I’ve saved over the years, including the Washington Post from Sept. 12, 2001. I lived in Washington then, and the yellowing, curled edges of the paper, complete with a photo of the twin towers ablaze in New York City, bring back the chaos and disbelief of the days that followed.

My morning ritual in Washington included buying the Post from a paper box on the corner for 25 cents. Having it in my hands made me feel like a real Washingtonian, and reading about its power players and behind-the-scenes politicking told me there was always more happening than the rest of us were supposed to know. I decided I wanted to write the stories in the paper myself.

But after graduating from journalism school, the first three jobs I had were online only, with not a shred of newsprint to be found. The first was a website I started myself, because I had never felt the political stories I read from major newsrooms were targeted to young women like me.

I called my website Citizen Jane Politics and, armed with a laptop, a tiny camera and an inexplicable sense of why-not-me, I bought a ticket to Des Moines, Iowa, to cover the caucuses myself. I posted my campaign news four times a day, and young women across the country read it all. Digital media made that possible.

I stayed on the campaign trail for the rest of that election cycle. But my first run as a media mogul also taught me a difficult lesson about the business — it is incredibly hard to pay for, especially when other digital platforms and social media were making the news completely free.

During one especially humbling moment, I remember looking at a tomato in a grocery store in Georgetown and realizing that nobody thought those tomatoes were free, but they did think that news should be.

I was offered a job covering Capitol Hill for AOL News and then the Daily Beast, and took them both, grateful to have someone else to handle the books and the wild amount of computer coding that digital media requires. None of my work ever showed up in a newspaper, but when I went home to visit my parents in Atlanta, the stack of printouts of my pieces from Washington told me my mother was clipping those stories, too.

I eventually became a nationally syndicated political columnist and then a columnist for the AJC. But being a “newspaper columnist” today isn’t the job it used to be. Along with writing columns, I also write for our morning politics newsletter, which is sent to subscribers’ inboxes every day. I also co-host our politics podcast, and try to post all of it to social media.

Although my friends’ parents tell me they still read my columns in the newspaper, friends my own age usually see what I do only when it pops up on Instagram or Facebook. High school and college students tell me they recognize my voice from our podcast, where they get all of their news about Georgia politics.

For those students, hearing something on a podcast means it’s important. And since we’re doing a podcast for them, it means they’re important, too.

I’m not sure how my mom will ever clip the podcast, but she and my dad do listen to it. Now in his 80s, my newspaper-loving father also figured out how to read stories on the AJC’s app on his phone, long before I ever did. When the light is low or his eyes aren’t having their best days, he even listens to my columns with the AI-generated voice that, incredibly, all of our articles now feature.

And this Sunday, and for as long as it lasts, my mom will clip this column out of the newspaper with a cut-cut-cut, to save for later and remind the world that we were all here.