It occurred to me one day, that it shouldn't be too difficult to self-publish a newsletter or newspaper. This is probably because I know next-to-nothing about doing this, and have never done it before, but this kind of ignorance may actually be an advantage in this case. It breeds optimism.
I grew up reading newspapers. Its partly just a habit, but I like it.
Sometimes it expands my view of the world. Sometimes I hear about
ideas or people or books that I didn't even know existed. Now, as I
write this (in an old plain-text unix text-editor called 'vim') it
is currently the year 2026. Why on earth would anyone consider printing
words on paper in this era of the digital super-nova? Perhaps this
document will try to answer that question, at least to myself.
The written word is slower than the digital word. It is more laborious to write and more laborious to read. It requires effort, and demands attention. It is out of fashion. In my neighbourhood, which you can guess from the title of the newspaper is South Hobart, Tasmania, Australia, very few newspapers are sold. There is only one national broadsheet (or “small-sheet” for that matter) which is “The Australian” , a Murdoch/Newscorp title which I religiously buy despite it’s frequently odious world-view.
In my neighbourhood, I think that probably only about 10 copies of this broadsheet are sold each day and South Hobart is probably one of the more broadsheet-reading areas of Hobart. The printed newspaper is withering, forlornly dwindling away. We are living in the era of the coming tsunami of the “Large Language Models” , and I, as a hobbyist computer-programmer can see the coming revolution as clearly as many. It is almost a closed case, now, in April 2026, that Large Language Models are better at writing computer-code than human beings. That is a strange truth. But despite this situation, I continue to have faith in ink-on-paper. Food-grade ink.
We think differently when we read something printed. Our brains have time to digest, and our eyes can go back and forth, cogitating on the grammar and semantics. Our thoughts are slower, but deeper. And newspapers are a kind of silent conversation between the members of a society.
There are a few significant, ahem, ... hurdles that I need to jump before “The South Hobart Review of Book Boxes” can become reality. I need to produce something in PDF or Postscript format (okay, just PDF really). And I need to layout the articles in cute columns with graphics and insets. I need to learn about 'gutters' and column widths. I need to find some entity who will be happy to print my newspaper on newsprint . It must be newsprint, or else it won’t feel like a real paper.
My idea for my paper, is to produce it when I can. And distribute it for reading in coffee-shops. I will not try to make the content “print-only”. I will probably publish the articles and other content right here at www.shrob.org but the web-version is not really the point. It will just be a back-up, a reference.
I am influenced by the idea of “samizdat” (самиздат), which is the idea that if something is worth reading, then people will copy it out by hand, word by word, no matter the obstacles or dangers, just as they did with the works of Solzhenitsyn (Александр Солженицын). Perhaps in the West, because of the endless torrent of words that engulfs us, we have lost the appreciation of the power of written truth.
In South Hobart, Tasmania there are many book boxes . A “book box” or a “street book box” is a box containing free books that is placed just outside somebody's front fence. They are often filled with romantic pot-boiler novels as well as “classics” that nobody seems to want to read. Charles Dickens for example. Sometimes I find books that I think my son will be interested in, and I take them home. Sometimes I stand in the street reading a book that I have found in the book-box, trying to decide if it is worth carrying home.
You, whoever you are, are welcome to contribute to this paper, especially if you are a local. It is not a commercial project. You will not be financially rewarded. But if you have something to say, say it. I hope to do real interviews as part of this project. And I would like to do them “in” person" not virtually. I don't think I will print many copies of each issue or edition. Maybe twenty. But there is value in scarcity.
comments/contributions/suggestions to: mjb <at> nomlang.org