“A good newspaper is a nation talking to itself.” — Arthur Miller

She works through the late night planning the layouts of pages, assigning reporters to cover events, and she’s always on the lookout for a good story.

He works the sports desk on Friday nights into the early morning Saturday hours waiting for his writers to send him their summaries and stats of high school football games.

“Were it left to me to decide if we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter.” — Thomas Jefferson

Someone has the job of setting the daily obituaries, deciding on the Spotlight feature and readying the business page. Filling pages with local news is always the priority, but some stories are pulled from The Associated Press wire that are major national news or will be of interest to circulation area readers.

Then there are those in charge of marketing and preparing the advertisements. Press operators run the publishing presses all week long and into the wee hours of Saturday mornings so that the delivery drivers can slide your newspaper into your mailbox. Online pages are posted after the presses are shut down.

“People don’t actually read newspapers. They step into them like a hot bath.” — Marshall McLuhan

A house full of writers, editors, press operators, marketing managers and delivery men and women get the paper into your hands six days a week. There may be no better bargain than to get updated national and local news, sports and columns into your mind for under one dollar.

“If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you do read the newspaper, you’re misinformed.” — Mark Twain

Newspapers have always been in the forefront of controversy. What is chosen for publication versus what is not is a matter of editorial privilege. The visual media fires seven stories of death, destruction and disaster into our brains in just a few minutes, or we can choose to hold the world in our hands and ignore the latest news about all the devastation.

Instead, we can read a feature about how far songbirds travel to get from cold climates to warmer places. We can skip past the front page top story that reports a fire that destroyed 1,000 acres in California and turn to sports and read about a local football team being invited to Penn State to hold a huge American flag on the field during the playing of the national anthem.

If we watch the TV news, we are locked inside a box that we can’t escape unless we change the channel. With newspapers, we decide what we want to know simply by scanning our eyes across the pages.

“To look at the paper is to raise a seashore to one’s ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity.” — Alain de Botton

Newspapers occupy our minds for as long as it takes to drink a morning cup of coffee or for the five minutes between the time we come home from work until dinner is ready. Of course, there are multiple uses for the paper after the stories have been read. Put it under the paint-by-number canvas to catch any drips. Roll one up and swat that annoying housefly. Start a fire with yesterday’s sports pages. Lay the news down on the kitchen floor and let the new puppy pee all over the world.

“Don’t tell me about the Press. I know exactly who reads the papers. The Daily Mirror is read by the people who think they run the country. The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country. The Times is read by the people who actually do run the country. The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country. The Financial Times is read by people who own the country. The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country. The Daily Telegraph is read by the people who think it is.” — Antony Jay

Newspapers make a local vegetable farmer famous for three minutes to his circulation area readers. A soccer player’s story that reports her winning goal for her team in overtime is of interest to a classmate from her school until she’s done reading the article and chucks the newspaper into the recycle can.

A man buys his dream car after finding it in the classified ads. A husband and wife have big success after advertising their garage sale in the paper. Newspapers can be important to us for only a few minutes — or for the rest of our lives.

Who hasn’t found an old newspaper, yellowed by time, that takes them down Memory Lane? Who hasn’t cut out a keepsake article when they see their name printed in a newspaper?

Someday in the not too distant future, a museum guide will take a group of schoolchildren into a room stacked with old newspapers that have become extinct like the dinosaurs.

“What’s a newspaper?” a curious little girl will ask.

“It was a bunch of printed pages that people read to learn about the world, see photos from the sports they liked, find out who died, how much honey a bee hive can make, get advice on how to make a marriage better, get a good laugh from cartoons and comics.”

“Wow,” says the little girl. “All that was in one newspaper? It must have cost a billion dollars!”

“Nah,” says the guide. “You’d get all that for just 75 cents.”

Email Rich Strack at richiesadie11@gmail.com