The Biz: debut of a new column.

By: Jennifer Saba In the throes of working on a feature about newspapers in schools, I'm finding that almost every source says the same thing: Getting papers into the hands of kids makes future readers.

The people who direct Newspapers In Education programs are delighted when they watch Web-obsessed students in action, actually reading -- or at least scanning -- newsprint and tearing stories or pictures out of pages. This got me thinking about the first time newspapers made an impression in my life.

I hate to report: I can't remember. No eureka moment for me.

Newspapers were always just there, kind of like the TV or the stereo, stuff in the background. My early memories of the local dailies are pretty fragmented.

Crawling around on my grandparents' second floor playing hide and seek under a pitched roof, I once found a box of yellow and ragged pages from one of the Dallas papers, screaming headlines about World War II. At seven, I thought that was beyond cool, and I loved pouring over the 1940s editions.

That made an impression. Twenty-two years later, when I moved to New York, I made it a point to find and save every New York Times for a month after 9/11.

I remember the neat stacks of day-old papers that my parents kept under a wine rack; and my father lining his office trash with day-old Wall Street Journals.

My classroom experience with newspapers is rather lackluster (sorry, NIE peeps). I did create one fake newspaper when I was in the first grade, if that counts. It held scrawled little stories about the U.S. boycott of the 1980 Olympics, the failed rescue attempt of the hostages in Iran, oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico. In Texas at that time, people treated slicks with the same mild annoyance as, say, jellyfish or thick patches of seaweed. (Just swim around it!) I even sensed the oncoming trend of softer features and included in my edition what to wear in the summer (swimsuits) and how to lose weight (eat lots seafood and drink ice water).

I never worked on my high school or college papers. And aside from glancing at the comics, I didn't officially start consistently reading the paper until after college. So I was a bit ahead of my time.

OK, that's not entirely true. During one summer when I was 17, I had this mind-numbing job of answering phones at a law firm. Out of sheer boredom, I picked up one of the partner's Wall Street Journals -- it was that or the law review. To my surprise, and to the annoyance of the partner, I found myself reading the center column of the Journal every morning.

The habit didn't last past my summer stint. Yet, take heart Dow Jones, because, until I started reading the Journal, I pegged it as a snooze. So kids today may make the same leap. If they can stay awake long enough.

Despite my start-and-stop reading habits, and the fact that my education didn't include newspapers in the classroom, I was lucky. Newspapers were always there, even if I didn't give them the time of day. Perhaps I am a double anomaly: growing up to not only becomes a journalist but one who covers the newspaper industry. For all the indifference I had about daily newspapers, I can't imagine a life without them. And I still have that newspaper I created in first grade.