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. “It looked like a dentist’s office in our house," said Butkus, a 39-year-old hedge-fund manager in Barrington, R.I. 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 Sharing information online “seems impersonal now to us," he added. 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. While articles may be outdated by the time the envelope arrives, he said, “You’re glad to get it because A, it’s not junk mail, and B, more importantly, it’s not a bill."