Diehards Still Mailing Newspaper Clips to Family and Friends

The 71-year-old clips newspaper and magazine articles at home in Sudbury, Mass., where he keeps a photocopier, envelopes and stamps to mail copies to family and friends. “We try to inform and amuse," Butkus said of his longtime habit of circulating stuff he reads.

He sometimes mails copies of the same article to multiple recipients but generally tries to personalize his selections. Butkus recently sent his brother an article about three-story triplex homes becoming popular in Boston—“We grew up in one," he said—and mailed a funny cartoon about exercising to his former health-club trainer. “I still see her around town," he said.

Sharing newspaper clippings used to be common before the internet disrupted everything. It wasn’t just the move from snail mail to email. There are now a lot fewer printed newspapers and magazines to clip from.

Peter Butkus said when he was growing up his father must have subscribed to as many as six newspapers and more than a dozen magazines. “It looked like a dentist’s office in our house," said Butkus, a 39-year-old hedge-fund manager in Barrington, R.I. The elder Butkus doesn’t dispute it.

During the golden age of print, when newspapers were generally regarded as having the last word, people regularly passed around articles on shared interests or to settle arguments in I-told-you-so missives. Parents often mailed clippings as thinly veiled advice or criticism to grown children.

Joe Coscia’s mother still mails him clips from her local paper in Niagara Falls, N.Y. Coscia, a 39-year-old middle-school math teacher, grew up there and now lives with his wife and two sons in King George, Va.

The most recent clip from his mother was an obituary for his former barber, which struck him as thoughtful and somewhat odd. “We talk on the phone once a week," he said, “but she didn’t mention it to me at all. I found out through the mail."

Coscia’s mother once sent him a clipping of an advice column suggesting parents not bring babies to restaurants, he said. She had joined Coscia and his wife at a restaurant just two weeks earlier. Coscia’s oldest son had colic and cried through the whole meal.

“She was very concerned about the people around us," Coscia recalled. The clip, he said, “was her way of saying, ‘Aha, I told you!’ "

For years, Marshall Burkhart said his 67-year-old father mailed him clips of editorials from various publications, hoping to broaden his political views. While it doesn’t always work, “it always puts a big smile on my face," said Burkhart, 33, an executive at a healthcare startup in the Boston area. These days, his father uses his phone’s camera to send digital copies of the articles. They are impossible to read, he said, but nonetheless represent “the evolution of my dad."

Shirley Finney, 80, of East Hartford, Conn., sends clippings from two local papers in envelopes adorned with heart-shaped stickers, or ones of cowboy hats and boots if she’s mailing her grandson. To save on postage, Finney tries to include more than one clipping, which she cuts out of the newspaper using her grandmother’s pinking shears to make zigzag edges.

Among the articles Finney has sent her daughter was one about how to protect dry cat food from mites. Finney recently cut out a comic strip from the Hartford Courant and included it with a check to her utility company to express frustration with the expensive total. The joke: the inventor of electricity also invented the electric bill. “I am a frugal woman," she said.

Article clipping and sharing dates back to the early 1800s, when newspapers started mass production in urban areas, said Eric Lehman, an English professor at the University of Bridgeport, in Bridgeport, Conn. People would cut out and mail stories, as well as advertisements, to relatives in rural areas who pasted them into scrapbooks. “It was like curating a Facebook page," Lehman said.

Sharing information online “seems impersonal now to us," he added. That might explain why some people refuse to drop the clipping habit.

When Beth Larimer’s three children went off to college, she started mailing them newspaper articles, a habit she picked up from her mother and grandmother. “You have a better chance of them reading something because you’ve taken the time to mail it," she said.

Now that her children are out of school and working full time, Larimer, 59, leaves newspaper clippings in their old bedrooms to read when they visit their childhood home in Brentwood, Tenn. “Sometimes they chuckle at me, which is fine," she said.

Larimer’s youngest son, Jack Larimer, a researcher for an asset-management firm in West Hartford, Conn., was visiting for Christmas and found an article about the condition of the U.S. economy waiting for him on his old bedside table. “It stirred a debate," he said. “My mom and I enjoyed it."

Peter Butkus said his father’s decadeslong clipping habit meant that the morning newspaper when he was a kid sometimes looked more like Swiss cheese if you slept too late. “You’d have to get up pretty early to get a mint-condition newspaper," he said.

The elder Butkus takes pride in sticking to his clipping routine. While articles may be outdated by the time the envelope arrives, he said, “You’re glad to get it because A, it’s not junk mail, and B, more importantly, it’s not a bill."