Offering a synthesis of research and thought on the notion of newsreading as a form of play, this paper focuses on newsreading as a symbolic action of incorporating cultural attitudes by reading a newspaper. Sections of the paper discuss the following topics: (1) play, culture, and communication--defining play in its cultural and communicative contexts; (2) newsreading as play--the pleasurable but disinterested state that an individual creates and fashions when reading a newspaper, the aesthetics of news, and the intrinsic value of newsreading; and (3) toward an ethnography of newsreading--the necessary shift in attention from the newspaper to newsreading, from empirical research on the use of newspapers to essays that present cultural analyses of the individuals who are doing the newsreading. (RL)