Why Print Rules
The anecdote to the selected information crisis may lie from the past
In the modern era, timeliness is everything. We want to get everything quick: Clothes, food, messages, or packages from Amazon. But the most prized commodity that relies on speed is information, the rise of digital media and social media made it easier for news to be spread around the world at a moment’s notice, and people who aren’t even trained journalists can document world-changing events with a black glass box that fits neatly into a pocket.
However, even with all the benefits of digital media, I still like to read the news and information in print if available.
Close friends of yours truly probably know my habit of reading and subscribing to print magazines, and grabbing print newspapers (yup, they still exist!) from the newsstand whenever possible. Many might see my practice as outdated or a “boomer move.” But in this rapid quickfire information era, the print era may hint at how to solve some underlying issues plaguing society.
Firstly, there is a special interaction that you can only get from print media which you will never get in digital. The feel of opening a magazine, or a hard-covered book, is entirely different compared to clicking on a news article on a website or reading an e-book on your iPad. Print media provides a physical touch to the medium you are receiving from. It varies from person to person, and it is hard to explain a deep-rooted experience. In my view, the sensation of reading media through paper is refreshing given my constant exposure to online material, and I do encourage everyone to try that out more.
Secondly, the layout and design of print media are very different from digital media. For example, news websites like The Economist jam-pack their content into a webpage that people can scroll through, while clickbait-adjacent headlines are included in a web design that feels boring if you scroll through the website regularly. But in print, the magazine feels more refreshing than online. The layout and design that arranges the texts and words are different compared to online, and in some ways, it is more interesting than the interactive content you have to scroll through with your finger or mouse because it generates an overview of the content you are exposed to. With digital articles, they are usually composed of one article you need to scroll to finish. In print, many articles only take one to two pages, so you can quickly move from one article to the next, sometimes even on the same page!
Thirdly, and most importantly, print media doesn’t provide the filters you unconsciously or consciously use online. In social media, algorithms and user patterns dictate what you can or cannot see. In digital media, headlines are probably the only way people get to interact with news content, while people only will choose to click on the articles that attract them. Yet in print media, things work differently. As you flick through the pages of a magazine or newspaper, you are engaging with a controlled amount of content that is less tailor-made for you the reader personally, but reflecting what the editors think are appropriate and necessary for a larger audience. That means you will be exposed to different articles on different subjects, that some of you might not be interested in at the start. But as your eyes are scanning through the pages, there might be one or two articles you did not have an interest in at the beginning that evolve into an interesting read. I have had that experience multiple times, an article I did not pay much attention to on the website captured my interest when I was reading it in the print edition.
The unspoken benefits of print media hence can guide society’s big information problems. The filtration in digital media has led to polarization, a warped view of the world, and a badly informed public easily susceptible to misinformation and disinformation. Maybe what print media had in store for decades, if not centuries, might provide some hints into what can be done to heal an ignorant Populus.
On an end note, print media might not be the money-loser everyone in the news industry thinks it is. Private Eye, a British satirical magazine, was the biggest-selling and biggest-growing print news and current affairs magazine in the UK and Ireland for several years, including as recently as 2022. The recipe for its success, the editor Ian Hislop put it to putting everything online. To paraphrase him, as long as you’re not putting anything online, people will naturally buy the print product.