The case for print journalism

Sep 10, 2016 - Politico - Why Print News Still Rules - "I’ve been an online journalist for 20 years—and still, you’ll have to pry my newspaper from my cold dying hands."

I get most of my news from the Web as it flows to my desktop, my tablet, my phone, and now my watch.

I'm sorry to hear that.

Walking through the POLITICO newsroom I inhale the news from the TV screens that cover the walls.

Mmm. It's possible to get "news" over the TV. ?? What's the definition of "news"? The fictional HBO series The Newsroom, which was about a TV news program, defined news as information that a voter could find useful on election day.

When it comes to news, I'm an ocean that refuses no river. But when it comes to immersion—when I really want the four winds of news to blow me deeper comprehension—my devotion to newsprint is almost cultistic. My eyes feel about news the way my ears feel about music driven from a broken pair of speakers—distorted, grating, and insufferable.

Uh, what? Get to the point, instead of writing the opening to a novel.

Reading online, I comprehend less and I finish fewer articles than I do when I have a newspaper in hand.

I've read a story or two that supports the notion that reading print leads to better comprehension. I don't remember why. That's funny. I obviously read that claim online.

A print newspaper supports my idea of adopting the Slow News Movement.

More form the Politico story:

As a more rudimentary form of media, newsprint has the power to focus me. It blocks distractions. Give me 20 minutes with the newsprint version of the Times and I'm convinced I could clobber anybody in a news quiz who used the same time reading from the Times website.

I don't know about this claim:

What accounts for print’s superiority? Print - particularly the newspaper - is an amazingly sophisticated technology for showing you what’s important, and showing you a lot of it. The newspaper has refined its user interface for more than two centuries.

Define "important". Who gets to decide what is important? Obviously for a newspaper, the publisher, maybe the editorial board, and the paper's editors get to decide what's important. But what if 90 percent of what's published in a local print newspaper is unimportant to me? Enter the web. It's not the local web. It's the world wide web.

But my Slow News Movement idea of reading news for 30 to 60 minutes per day and that's it may be better supported by a morning or evening routine of reading a print newspaper that has a finite ending. Once immersed into the web, it's up to the reader to say, "Enough". The final words on the last page of the newspaper is a hard, finite ending. Then it's time to do something else. Sure, like wasting time on the web.

My Slow News Movement idea eschews the breaking news mindset of thinking that its imperative to know everything that is happening at the moment that it happens. Nope. Wait until the next morning or whenever it's time to engage in SNM reading. Sometimes, a lot of the breaking news is wrong in the early stages.

More from the Politico story:

Newspaper designers have created a universal grammar of headline size, typeface, place, letter spacing, white space, sections, photography, and illustration that gives readers subtle clues on what and how to read to satisfy their news needs.

Web pages can't convey this metadata because there's not enough room on the screen to display it all. Even if you have two monitors on your desk, you still don't have as much reading real estate that an open broadsheet newspaper offers.

Computer fonts still lag behind their high-resolution newsprint cousins, and reading them drains mental energy. I’d argue that even the serendipity of reading in newsprint surpasses the serendipity of reading online, which was supposed to be one of the virtues of the digital world.

Maybe that's because media websites are poorly designed because of the obnoxious ads that consume screen real estate because the media org's business model needs that digital ad revenue. Data shows that people do read long articles on phones.

Why is the Kindle ebook reader so popular? It focuses on the text. It's portable. It consumes little space. It allows users to customize the reading experience settings, including the font type, font size, text color, and background color.

I don't think print design is a reason that a print newspaper is better than its web counterpart. The latter probably needs a simpler design to improve the reader experience. When media orgs create reader-hostile websites, that's not the web's fault.

More from the Politico story:

Veteran tech journalist Ed Bott talks about newsprint's ability to routinely surprise you with a gem of a story buried in the back pages, placed there not because it's big news but because it's interesting. "The print edition consistently leads me to unexpected stories I might have otherwise missed," agrees Inc. Executive Editor Jon Fine. "I find digital editions and websites don’t have the same kind of serendipity—they’re set up to point you to more of the same thing."

Reading a newspaper, you explore for the news like a hunter in a forest, making discoveries all the way. The Web offers news treasures, too, but they often feel unconnected to one another, failing to form a daily news gestalt.

Reading a newspaper is a contemplative exercise that can't be matched by a screen. Is it because you hold it in your hand? Probably not. Scholars agree that reading retention suffers on a Kindle compared to a book, and that it doesn’t allow for the deep immersion of its paper cousin.

Likewise, the literal physicality of a newspaper signals useful information to readers. Picking up a daily newspaper, you can gauge by the feel how much news there is today, something a Website can't do.

Just as the dimensions of a dinner plate communicates how much one should eat, the dry weight of a daily newspaper gives the reader signals about how much they need to read to reach news satiation. Not so on the Web, where no matter how much you read, you feel like you missed something important.

Newsprint's superiority became obvious to me this summer when circumstances prevented early morning delivery of three dailies—the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. I did my best to keep informed by spending about a half hour on each newspaper's website, scrolling and clicking. Later in the morning when the newsprint versions were delivered I was astonished to find how many worthy stories I had skipped or bailed on when reading online.

Something that I might agree with, when thinking about the Slow News Movement:

Reading online speeds things, usually to the point that they begin to blur. But reading newsprint slows you down, giving your news absorption a "human scale" feel, and lends clarity to the experience. News is best sipped like whiskey, not chugged like beer.

I definitely agree with this viewpoint:

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