• by Lydia Loizides , Op-Ed Contributor, April 10, 2008

Ours is an interesting house, if for no other reason that we read the newspaper --everyday. Lately, my 5-and-a-half-year-old has become obsessed with hockey (making his Canadian mother proud) and as a result, our breakfast time is spent eating, spilling and reading over the hockey standings. As part of the fun, he cuts the pictures and articles out and sets them on his desk for after-school analysis.

This past Tuesday, as we were about to start cutting, he came across a picture of a clown fish on the front page of the New York Times science section. Wanting to make sure that cutting this out didn't destroy any article I had yet to read, I opened the section and began browsing. If there is one thing I still love, it's the feel of newspaper in my hands -- it reminds me of being a kid, sitting at my kitchen table and reading it to my mother, whose first language was Greek and who sometimes needed a little extra help. I loved the way my hands would get dirty, the smell of the ink, the feeling of being "grown up" because I was reading the paper.

As it happened, I came across an article entitled "Keeping Priorities Straight, Even at the End," which is about a professor at Carnegie Mellon University named Randy F. Pausch who is dying of pancreatic cancer. Now, I know this sounds morbid and unrelated to television, but indulge me here. Dr. Pausch was given his diagnosis last fall and told that he would likely die within 6 months. Being a man who had his priorities straight, he decided to stop working and spend time with his three children, ages 6, 4 and 2. He prepared his last lecture (www.cmu.edu/randyslecture) not about cancer but as a way to simplify, "a father's effort to digest a lifetime of advice for his children into one talk." He was speaking to his children. And, unbeknownst to him at the time, 10 million people who subsequently downloaded the lecture online. Ten million.

Since that time, Dr. Pausch has, with the help of Jeff Zaslow, written a book, "The Last Lecture," which has already been translated into seven languages. Diane Sawyer was granted an interview (it aired this last Wednesday), but a documentary was denied for fear that it would eat up precious time away from his children. If anyone can manage to option the rights, drop me a line.

So what we have here, folks, is a multiplatform story that has transcended the bounds of one man's experience and touched the lives of millions of people through the use of television, the Internet, books and good ol' newspapers. More importantly, it has caused me to save a particular section of newspaper, safely tucked away in at my desk, as a reminder of what really matters. And one day, my son and I will sit, watch the lecture online, read the article, watch a streamed version of the interview with Sawyer, browse the book and hopefully, see the movie. Ain't media great?