There’s something about newspapers that always bring me back to them.

Maybe it’s just the feel, or the smell, or that act of walking out the front door every morning to a fresh edition.

I have always been drawn to newspapers, and I think more people should be too.  

But the love I have for newspapers was within me long before I wrote for the Daily Vidette; growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, I would walk down every morning to the Daily Herald laid out on the dinner table.

I would shuffle through the headlines and force myself to read articles that wouldn’t always appeal to me, but I wanted to understand and be able to follow current events.

I would always save my favorite section, kind of like my dessert, for last: the sports pages.

This is where my love affair with newspapers began, and I always fantasized the idea of someday writing for one.

Recently, I came across an interesting scene.

It happened in one of my communication classes in Fell Hall. A professor of mine held up a newspaper and pointed to a headline of the scandal at the University of Arkansas involving, now disgraced, head football coach Bobby Petrino.

He then asked, “Who knows what this story is about?” Before I was able to mutter a word, a student blurted out, “He was fired because he crashed his motorcycle with a girl on it.”

This is the kind of thing that irritates me about our generation. Everyone just reads a summary of a story rather than getting all the details.

The student who made the comment really didn’t have a clue of what went on with Petrino at Arkansas; he simply just knew that Petrino had crashed his motorcycle with a female on it.

He failed to mention that the female the coach had on the back of his motorcycle was Jessica Dorrell, the young-enough-to-be-Petrino’s-daughter who was involved in an affair with the head coach.

This student in my class probably read a ticker on the bottom of ESPN, or glanced at a story, and then moved on rather than investing the time to finding out the real details.  

Petrino crashing with Dorrell on his motorcycle, merely opened the flood gates to all the ugly details between the two.

This is why I encourage you all to read a newspaper every day; whether it’s the Vidette or any other paper, just pick it up and try to read it front to back, you may surprise yourself with how much you enjoy it.

Some people say they can get the same information on their computers, tablet, or smartphone, but with those technologies you pick and choose what you want to read.

Shuffling through newspapers my whole life, I can’t tell you how many times I was reading an article and another story caught my eye, something that rarely happens while on the web.

I feel very fortunate to have been given the opportunity to write for such a great student newspaper like the Daily Vidette.

It was just a year, but I tried to give you, the reader, as much intriguing and informative content as possible in any of my feature stories, and of course, my columns.

Maybe somehow the newspaper industry will find a way to keep delivering content to people’s front doors rather than just their web browsers, because I know those grey pages scattered across my family’s table every morning have inspired me much more than any website I’ve visited.