The majority of people reading this column will do so on our printed product that comes out in local stores on Thursdays and gets delivered to homes on Fridays.
A few might read this online, if we elect to make this one of our featured selections of the week. Some who get this online may print it out on, get this – paper – before reading it.
Who said newspapers, and paper in general, are dead?
According to both professors I have this semester in graduate courses at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, paper isn’t only not dead, but it’s more needed than ever. And other industry professionals I’ve heard lectures from recently have echoed the same sentiment.
What happened? Weren’t we supposed to be completely digital by now? Isn’t this supposed to be an iPad/tablet society?
For some of us, myself sort of included, we have gone digital. I’ve had an iPad for nearly a year now, and I love it. I’m able to browse the Internet and read both a large library of books and magazines from it without having to lug around, well, a library worth of books and magazines.
I also did a large amount of school work with the device, as I was able to download PDF files of journal articles I needed to read – all of which I could annotate and highlight using a simple app that allowed me to email those annotations and highlights to my email address.
But, I noticed something in a year of being digital. I didn’t read nearly as much as I used to. Whereas before, I received a physical subscription to Rolling Stone magazine, and before the next one arrived, I had usually read it front cover to back.
With a digital subscription, I browsed it once, went back and read a few select articles and then ignored most of the rest of the magazine. Graduate studies combined with work may have been a partial factor in reading less, but I think I had less incentive to read it when I didn’t have it physically with me.
The same applies to some of the books I bought digitally. Basically, I own them, but I haven’t read many of them. I’ll get to them later, I keep telling myself.
Professor Timothy Halkowski told students in his Current Topics in Health Communication class on Tuesday, Sept. 4, that he recommends they print the journal articles he assigned to read out, and not read them digitally, because you’ll get a lot more value out of them. “Paper has unique affordances,” he said.
I thought long and hard about that statement, particularly because of my job. He was right. It’s much easier to read a physical product than a digital one, for many reasons.
This observation made me happy. It means the printed newspaper product will be around for a long time, and not just a few years as some naysayers have said.
Those naysayers, which have included many reporters for some larger newspapers, have convinced people of the impending death of newspapers. They said it so much the entire newspaper industry began to believe them, and as a result many readers have believed this, too.
At a Wisconsin Newspaper Association workshop in Eagle River a couple of weekends ago, the guest speaker said this is a bunch of bah humbug. People like the printed product and they aren’t going to stop reading it, he said.
Another professor, Chris Sadler, agreed in another one of my classes. Paper has been around for thousands of years and it’s a technology that changed communication, he said.
We’re not old dogs at The Gazette. We recently updated our website and made it much more viable. But it still only offers a brief glimpse of what paper subscribers get. And as long as paper remains that essential communication tool people like, our printed product will always be the place where people will read the majority of our articles and columns, such as this one.
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Originally published in The Portage County Gazette on Sept. 14, 2012.
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