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Former American Press sportswriter Carl Dubois blogs about the games people play, in and out of sports, and the people you meet between and outside the lines.

Carl is an award-winning reporter and columnist living in the Willamette Valley in northwest Oregon, near Portland. He is sports editor of the News-Register newspaper in McMinnville, Ore.

 Meet the Blogger

If you’re happy and you know it, read your paper (clap, clap)

Posted November 22, 2008 at 9:54 am
Filed Under People | Leave a Comment

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BATON ROUGE — Interesting opening to a story Wednesday in The New York Times:

Happy people spend a lot of time socializing, going to church and reading newspapers – but they don’t spend a lot of time watching television, a new study finds.

That’s what unhappy people do.

Reading newspapers? I thought that was sooo 20th century.

But anyway … let’s continue reading.

Although people who describe themselves as happy enjoy watching television, it turns out to be the single activity they engage in less often than unhappy people, said John Robinson, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland and the author of the study, which appeared in the journal Social Indicators Research.

While most large studies on happiness have focused on the demographic characteristics of happy people – factors like age and marital status – Dr. Robinson and his colleagues tried to identify what activities happy people engage in. The study relied primarily on the responses of 45,000 Americans collected over 35 years by the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey, and on published “time diary” studies recording the daily activities of participants.

“We looked at 8 to 10 activities that happy people engage in, and for each one, the people who did the activities more – visiting others, going to church, all those things – were more happy,” Dr. Robinson said. “TV was the one activity that showed a negative relationship. Unhappy people did it more, and happy people did it less.”

But the researchers could not tell whether unhappy people watch more television or whether being glued to the set is what makes people unhappy. “I don’t know that turning off the TV will make you more happy,” Dr. Robinson said.

He probably can’t say whether buying a 42-inch high-definition TV will make it possible to stop taking Prozac either.

People who work at newspapers aren’t so happy these days. The industry is in crisis.

Maybe this is a way to turn things around. I sense an advertising campaign: Read your newspaper; that’s what happy people do.

Newspapers should probably put some of those ads on TV — and on the Internet.

The people who run newspapers already do a fair bit of socializing, one of the other documented characteristics of happy people. The people who work for them just might encourage them to join them in praying for the industry. Happy people go to church, the study reports.

It’s not necessarily an age thing. My niece, a high school senior, reads the American Press every day. I’ve seen her at the kitchen table, turning the pages. Good for her. Good for the paper.

Remember the ad campaign from years ago? Reading is fundamental.

Maybe those weren’t just words.

So, we’ve established that people who read newspapers are happy. Now we just have to figure out a way to perk up the folks who write the stories, take the photos and design the pages for all those happy people.

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