Life writes its own stories

Impact, values, wisdom and wit are all found in newspaper straplines. The strap ‘If You Don't Want It Printed, Don't Let It Happen’ in the Aspen Daily Times speaks simultaneously to avoiding unwarranted attention and maybe also to cheekily planning ways to garner attention. The Toronto Star's ‘It’s Where You Live’ strapline speaks to a sense of close community engagement, much as does the ‘As Waikato as It Gets’ of New Zealand’s Waikato Times. The news is about change, about how things are different, for good or ill, than they were before.

Many newspapers claim a mix of social, economic and intrinsic values:

• • ‘Life Writes Its Own Stories’, or ‘As Life Writes’ (‘Wie das Leben so schreibt’) in the Kleine Zeitung, Graz, Austria;

• • ‘All the News That's Fit to Print’ in the New York Times;

• • ‘The daily diary of the American dream’ in the Wall Street Journal;

• • The Sowetan, South Africa's daily newspaper, with slogans such as ‘Power your Future’ or ‘Sowetan. Building the Nation’;

• • ‘Right is of no sex, truth is of no color. God is the father of us all and all we are brethren’, the North Star Newspaper strapline reflecting the values of founder Frederick Douglass, who escaped slavery in 1838.

Others speak to measures of size, scale or importance. Britain is pretty boastful:

• • the ‘Biggest daily sale on Earth’, in the Daily Mail;

• • ‘When The Times speaks, the World listens’, in The Times;

• • ‘Daily Telegraph. Britain's Best Selling Daily Broadsheet’.

Some newspapers speak to education or knowledge. Such as:

• • ‘There's nothing more valuable than knowledge’, in the Cape Times;

• • ‘Your right to know. A new voice for a new Pakistan’, in the Daily Times newspaper, Lahore, Pakistan;

• • ‘The Guardian. Think …’.

All these newspapers want our attention; they are all seeking to make an impact on our day and to affect our thinking and behaviour.

Newspapers have fascinated me ever since the first permanent professional role I started in 1989. Daily I had to scour all the broadsheets and produce a current-awareness bulletin from clippings for my company by 9 o’clock every morning. Newspapers are not just for the here and now, though; as the saying goes, newspapers may be considered a first rough draft of history (Shafer, 2010).