How to start a junk journal 101: newspapers

Easy, cheap, and informative + a tour of my pandemic junk journal

During the pandemic I got into the habit of spending Sunday mornings reading the New York Times, cutting out things that caught my eye, and collaging them into a notebook. I didn’t realize it back then, but the body of work I created as a whole is a very clear snapshot of what was on my mind at the time – clearer than the pages of anxiety I wrote into my journal, clearer than the abstract art journal spreads and collages I was making.

How to get started? It’s simple and cheap. Grab an old composition book or notebook or whatever you have handy, a glue stick (UHU or some other permanent glue stick works best), and a pair of scissors.

BOOM

You’re in business.

I was very into attracting wildlife and birds into my backyard during the pandemic, so I decorated mine with the stickers from suet blocks. You can use stickers or paint or washi tape or not bother decorating it at all.

Junk journaling has no rules. Zero. Zip. Zilch.

It’s also meant to be accessible, inexpensive/free, and easy. Don’t let Weird QVC TikTokers tell you otherwise. Put the Grabie kit down and go dig around in your trash can.

Or better yet, grab a newspaper.

When you’re cutting out images/text from the newspaper, don’t worry about whether it will fit on your pages, or how. A passage from an article may jump out at you, or an advertisement, or a picture of a book you want to read.

Cut them all out.

It doesn’t matter what newspaper you use, or if you use a couple of different ones, or switch up which newspaper you use occasionally. Sometimes it’s nice to include different perspectives because you learn things.

Most often, I used the New York Times. Sometimes I used the Philadelphia Inquirer. We don’t have much of a local newspaper here anymore, which is a shame.

Politics start on a local level – in your school boards, your town councils, your city governments. Without a local newspaper to cover them, we don’t know what’s going on unless we make an effort to look for it and even then, it can be difficult to find because there’s not a consistent system.

A lot of municipalities and school boards now rely on Facebook to disseminate information. This is problematic because of Facebook’s algorithm, which prioritizes drama, anger, and now AI generated content. Important information is boring and doesn’t inspire people to stay locked into the platform the same way ragebait does.

For most of our lives government has chugged away quietly in the background doing boring government things, making sure essential services are arranged and paid for, shuffling paper around, and keeping important records. Local newspapers covered the boring government things and published that information, along with the details of when and where we could go watch the boring government things happen.

With the loss of our local newspapers, access to that information is now limited to people who have the interest and time to hunt it down. This blind spot has been weaponized against our country. What we’re seeing in Washington is the result of not seeing, or at the very least not appreciating and understanding what has been happening in our municipalities and school boards for the past ten years.

The folks now in Washington have been cutting their teeth banning books in our schools and militarizing the police in our municipalities while we weren’t paying attention because we were too busy fighting over Stanley cups and scrolling social media.

We lose the things we fail to appreciate.

Phone books.

Relationships.

Historical sites.

Access to information.

Newspapers.

Money.

Books.

Health.

Knowledge.

A functioning democratic government.

I may not love everything about the way the New York Times covers the news. But I do love newspapers and believe we need more of them. If we don’t support them, they go away.

The thing I’m struggling with the most right now is that I don’t know how to plan for anything. Our government is doing wildly unpredictable things, so far without consequence or constraint.

I do not know if we will have martial law tomorrow.

I do not know if a plane will fall out of the sky and land on my house tomorrow.

I do not know if the internet will exist, or cell service, or electricity.

I do not know if I will go to work and be far from my children, unable to keep them safe, if the president goads someone into attacking us because he doesn’t know how to behave like the civil servant he is.

I do not know that my children are safe. I do not feel safe myself.

On January 6, 2021, my father was having a lung biopsy after having been diagnosed with cancer (again). I couldn’t wait for him to wake up and come home because I knew he would have something wise to say and would help me feel safe.

His only words: “This just isn’t my world anymore, Jaybird, it’s just not my world.”

January 10, 2021 was the last newspaper collage I made until recently. I spent that year helping my dad feel safe while he underwent a grueling surgery and chemo.

You can always begin again, until you can’t.

Glue everything down while you can.