I wrote the first draft of this essay by hand. Call me an old lady, but I write
by hand a lot and, like my great mentor Roy Peter Clark, I advocate for reading the newspaper.
I'm a 22-year-old, Web-savvy news junkie who has accounts on Facebook, Twitter,
Pownce, Del.icio.us, LinkedIn and Flickr. I check The New York Times' Web site
incessantly for updates, and I have an iGoogle page that I check hourly for new RSS feeds from my favorite sites. I'm online at least eight hours
a day.
But as much as I'm logged into the online world, I look
forward to the end of the day when I can log off. I look forward to moments of peace
after work, moments that come mostly from my interaction not with pixels, but
with paper.
I write letters to friends and send them not with a click, but with
a stamp. I sit and fold floral origami paper to make turtles, cranes and other
critters. I print out long articles rather than reading them on the computer. I
use regular Post-its. I read books.
I subscribe to New York Magazine and, yes, I like the feel
of its somewhat glossy pages. I stick my nose in old, dusty books and inhale. I
keep a journal even though I have a blog. I cut out articles with scissors and
hang them on the refrigerator with magnets even though I have a Del.icio.us
page that I usually update daily. I like holding a pen when I read a book, to
mark favorite passages and circle words I don't know. I keep a learning log,
where I write down what I have learned for the day -- and I keep it on paper,
where it may burn but it won't crash.
Paper. The product that's been around for 2,000 years and still
hasn't lost its groove.
Both the Web and paper are thoroughly integrated into my
life, and I don't want to have to choose one over the other. I don't necessarily see it as my "duty" to read the newspaper, but I do see it as my sign of
appreciation for the hard work that goes into creating a newspaper. I see it as
my commitment to helping serve a noble profession. My purpose in obtaining news via print or online is
not so much about the medium itself but rather my experience of the medium.
Among readers who participated in Poynter's Eyetrack 07, people read online stories through to completion more often than they read print stories through to completion. That's one difference in the way people read online, compared with the way they read in print.
As the online world has developed, so too have efforts to make computer
displays more like paper. Think flat screen monitors and black print on white background. Microsoft researcher Bill Hill addresses this issue in his piece, "The Magic of Reading," [PDF] which highlights theories of readability and the need for readable electronic books.
While the Web offers interactive graphics,
audio slideshows, photo galleries, videos and more, the
way we experience this content varies considerably from the way we experience
content in a newspaper. In his essay, "Hamlet's Blackberry: Why Paper is
Eternal," [PDF] William Powers, media critic for the National Journal, talks in great detail about the lasting power of paper.
Powers refers to several works throughout his piece, including "Myth of the Paperless Office" published in 2002. Written by Abigail J.
Sellen and Richard H.R. Harper, both scholars of cognitive psychology and technology, the book looks at why we use paper and addresses
four ways that it helps us to better understand what we read. Powers summarizes
the findings here:
(1) Tangibility. This refers to the way that we navigate a paper document or book using our eyes and hands together. "When a document is on paper, we can see how long it is, we can flick through the pages . . . we can bend over a corner while searching for a section elsewhere. In other words, paper helps us work our way through documents."
(2) Spatial Flexibility. When working with multiple paper texts, they can be spread out around a large area or reduced to fit a smaller space, depending on our needs.
(3) Tailorability. With paper it's easy to underline, scribble in the margins and otherwise annotate a text we are reading.
(4) Manipulability. Because paper can be moved around, one can shuffle effectively among different paper sources, for example putting one page aside in order to concentrate on another.
Powers writes:
In other words, though the computer is in some ways the ultimate multi-tasking tool -- everything is a click away -- for productive multi-tasking, paper has an edge, rooted in its tangibility. Because online documents have no physical presence, when we're reading them the eyes and the brain are constantly at work figuring out where we are in the text, not just on the page displayed but in the document as a whole and vis-a-vis other open documents, as well as where we need to go next. The online reader expends a great deal of mental energy just navigating. Paper's tangibility allows the hands and fingers to take over much of the navigational burden, freeing up the brain to think.
When I navigate my way through the newspaper, my focus is the paper -- not the instant message that's blinking blue and orange, not the Gmail notifier
that's telling me I've got mail, not the four other tabs on my computer screen
that beg for attention (and usually end up getting it.) My focus is the
article that didn't catch my eye on the paper's Web site, the layout of the
pages that designers work so hard to put together but that never make it to the
Web.
Rather than advocate for the demise of
newspapers, we would do better to ask ourselves what function the print and
online media serve and how we can best shape these media to fit our experiences
of them. By the time I read the newspaper at 9
a.m., my experience of it changes depending on whether I watched
the 11 p.m. news the night before or listened
to NPR on the way to work. Much of the time, the paper's "breaking" news stories
are stale.
But the front-page story in yesterday's St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times about a father's struggle to
understand what led his son to commit suicide, and the story of a young soldier
who saved his life and others' by using a tourniquet, the hyper-local stories
that connect me to my neighborhood -- these are the types of stories that I can, and
want to, wait for. They're the stories I want to hold onto, in more ways than
one.
If our experience of reading the newspaper is "rooted in its
tangibility," shouldn't we look at what both media have to offer, rather
than saying one is superior to the other? Maybe we should restructure our
newsrooms so that both print and online can work together to create a business
model that works.
In a recent American Journalism Review article addressing the
transforming architecture of today's newsrooms, the Atlanta Journal
Constitution's publisher, John Mellott says: "It is high time that we sat
back and said, 'What is the proper design that will best serve our readers and
best serve our business model?' If we have to deal with the business issues,
let's not just go in there and cut X percent. Let's do it right. Let's look at
the fundamentals of this business."
Doing it right means restructuring newsrooms. It means looking
at the ways that we experience each medium and deciding how that experience
shapes the demand for print versus online ventures. It means advancing online
operations and changing the print newspaper, but not eradicating it.
Pixels might replace paper someday, but I'm counting on many
more years of ink-stained, tired hands.
[How does your experience of reading the newspaper differ from your experience of reading the news online?]
Thanks, everyone, for your thoughtful comments. It's refreshing to hear...
