Filippo Sensi, who has held it for years a very active and witty Twitter profile called @nomfup, on the morning of August 16, 2021, he woke up, remembered that there were no newspapers on newsstands today due to Ferragosto, and wrote a tweet on his part: “A boomer is an anacoluto that today, just today, he misses the newspapers on the newsstands ”.
I imagined that the “just today” was referring to the events in Kabul of the last few hours and I replied that on the Net there was all the information we wanted, there were courageous reports, there had been live coverage on YouTube of Al Jazeera from the presidential palace immediately after the entry of the Taliban, on Twitter I had seen dramatic videos of civilians attempting a desperate escape from the country and the Afghan president, after a long silence, had reappeared with a post on Facebook in which he explained why he preferred to flee (but not why his regime evaporated within hours).
In short, there was everything, if you wanted to get informed, even more. The result was a small, very polite discussion on the sense of paper newspapers. Still have one? Filippo Sensi says yes: there is “a market. Perhaps by now residual. A taste, of course”. I know that taste and share it: I collect historical paper newspapers and frame them as paintings for my apartment. But once, not a thousand years ago, in the summer in the morning I could not fail to go into the newsagent of the holiday resort that hosted me and refuel with newspapers and weeklies to face a day at the beach. You too? Now on the beach they are all there with their smartphone: some fool around, others talk on the phone showing the interlocutor the sea live, others hear the music or watch videos. Still others inquire. About Kabul.
If the fall of Afghanistan will go down in history as a failure of politics, the same cannot be said of journalism. In recent days, hundreds of colleagues from around the world have done an extraordinary job documenting what was happening. The coverage of the major newspapers like the Guardian and the New York Times she was excellent, but also Francesca Mannocchi’s reportages for Repubblica are an emblematic example: her he is there for the Espresso, paper edition, but he has written live for the Repubblica website. Luckily. Reading it was like being in Kabul in these hours.
Then, of course, the paper is beautiful: the paper newspapers will be back on newsstands tomorrow. Which I am now like the pleasure of horseback riding now that cars exist, trains and planes. Nice, every now and then, for a few.
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