E-Media Tidbits

Amy Gahran The "news-paper" -- I wish I could just update this rather than toss it.

"What's new about paper?" he asked, nudging it experimentally. Then he shook it out of its orange plastic bag. A sheaf of paper two inches thick showered onto his lap. "How does it work?" he asked.

"Well, this is paper -- kind of like what you use in your laser printer, but rougher and with cheaper ink," I said, before sneezing three times hard. Clearing my throat, I continued, "They have giant printers in Denver that print up thousands of these every day with news that was current as of something called 'press time,' and then they truck them out to towns, divide the truckloads into cars, and drop them on subscribers' doorstep. This news-paper is called the Denver Post."

"Like the Web site?"

"Exactly. And the podcast. Apparently they've been doing this paper thing longer than they've been online. Remember, I started writing that Carless in Boulder blog on YourHub? Well, YourHub does a special print edition for Boulder that republishes content from the site. I was curious to see what that looks like, but the only way I can get the print YourHub is to subscribe to either the print Post or Rocky Mountain News -- another news-paper."

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"Ah. Where's the YourHub section?"

"That only comes on Thursdays."

"You mean you have to handle all this paper every day?"

"No, I only paid for Thursdays, Sundays, and holidays."

"You paid for this?..." he frowned, shaking his head. "How do you search it?"

"It's not really searchable, but it's scannable. See, you can open up the pages wide and see lots of stories."

"Looks like mostly ads."

"Well, yeah, this page is mostly ads..." I rifled further through, and tossed aside entire sheafs of pages. "But then some pages have several stories, usually at the front of the sections. There are no links, though."

"You're kidding! What good is this, then?"

"To be honest, I can't say. But a lot of people like it -- even more than reading news online. They've got some good stories."

"Yeah, look here," he said. "Yesterday a zookeeper at the Denver Zoo got mauled and killed by a jaguar. They had to shoot the jaguar. A bunch of visitors saw the whole thing."

"Terrible," I replied. "And I'll bet someone has the whole thing on YouTube now. I guess that's one advantage of not reading this online."

"So this paper thing doesn't need charging or batteries? Well, that's cool," he said. "So you can take it anywhere. But what if it gets wet?"

"What happens if your laptop gets wet?"

"Good point. So what do you do with all this paper when you're done?"

"Recycle it. And throw out the plastic bag."

He shrugged. "Seems like a lot of paper and effort for so little news. I don't see the point."

"Well, I'm giving it a chance. Some of my colleagues swear by this stuff."

"It's your money. At least the screen resolution is decent."