I like to take photos of empty and/or abandoned places. I wonder who was there before me or why someone isn’t there now. What life did the place have prior to my arrival and why does it not have the same life now?

When I stumbled across the relics I’m focusing on for Thursday Doors this week, which caught my eye because they, too, have been abandoned, I knew what life these doors had before me, and I know why they don’t have a life now. It made me a bit sad, even though I’m a fan of progress as well, that these blasts from the past have been tossed aside in favor of 21st century “improvements” (not necessarily a good thing).

I still have a zillion magazine subscriptions that come to the house, pile up, then I spend a few Sundays flipping through the pages and reduce the pile. But I haven’t had a newspaper subscription in years. I used to subscribe to the local paper. Then I subscribed to the local and the Sunday New York Times. Then I canceled them all and just read what I could online. Then, the paywalls went up and I read the limited amount I could online (pro tip: browsing incognito (in Chrome, at least) lets you read four articles each day, but endless amounts per month at NYT online, whereas if you’re not incognito, you get four article per month — shhh, don’t tell anybody).

I shouldn’t be surprised then, and I actually wasn’t, that these doors are to empty boxes. So few people actually subscribe (let’s face facts — so few people actually read anymore). I think it was a perfect storm, though — news outlets forgot their main purpose of delivering what we need to know and instead tried to tailor their products to particular consumers (and were wrong, hence their hastened demise). But also, people aren’t reading. They’re scrolling, posting photos of their highly curated existence, and, even if they do read, they read only what already confirms what they believe.

Le sigh.

Anyway, before I get too ranty, let’s just tip a hat to the abandoned newspaper boxes (am I the only one who likes abandoned/empty places to photograph?), remnants of a (better) time gone by.

This post is one of many through Thursday Doors by Norm Frampton. See other doors — from around the world — on his weekly linkup and/or on the Twitter at #ThursdayDoors. See more of my doors here.