Newspapers: Tactile or Virtual?

    I had an interesting conversation recently with a New York Times reader who wanted my views, as a Washington insider and part time pundit, on why they were making him pay for Tom Friedman.  Newspapers are scared to death of the Internet, I opined.  "I read him a lot less often now,"  he said. I've heard this a lot lately.  Is Times Select the new New Coke?

    More proof of the fear lurking in the news business is found at Washingtonpost.com, where online versions of Post stories include links to carping bloggers like me.  Word has it the Post did a focus group and asked the coveted younger demographic what it was that kept them from reading newspapers.  It was the way they tended to pile up in the house, they said. News executives are sure they're hearing the voice of doom.  Even Michael Kinsley, perhaps embittered by his recent eviction, says he won't bother getting the real paper in front of his house if it's more than 10 feet away.

    I, on the other hand, love to hold newspapers, turn their pages, serendipitously find stories I wouldn't find by scrolling down a list of headlines.  I used to love to buy the Guardian, even though I could get all the same content on line, and luxuriate in it's over-sized pages, finding news stories that the U.S. press wouldn't discover for a year.  (Notably the one about that little translation error about the virgins in the afterlife on offer to suicide bombers)  But they stopped shipping the real paper to the States a couple of years ago, replacing it with a faxed version that's as reader unfriendly as a utility bill. Now I pay twice as much for a digital version which I read far less often, and always less completely than I used to. I used to at least glance at every page of the paper, now days go by and I don't even look at it.

    A surgical resident in a New York City hospital told me once that the gloves they used were called "New York Times" gloves, because they were designed to protect from the Old Gray Lady's seepage. All those in favo(u)r  of printed newspapers please comment below.

    One more thing.  The inscrutably named Jennifer 8.Lee has a surprisingly wonderful article in the Times about Chinatown life.  Is there still such a thing as the New York Times Style book, and if so, does it say anything about punctuating numbers in surnames?

Comments

[laura]

Dood you got linked! congrats! Put on your Pundit Hat and dance about the room!

Vonnegut basically said the same thing when asked if the internets would be the death of books. He raised the same points - the tactile quality of print and the meditative state of being absorbed in reading. No matter how you try it's hard to get comfy in a chair with a laptop - not to mention the damn cat will keep walking on the keyboard

[Dr. Barc]

William, you and I are a dying breed. I take multiple pleasures in the reading of physical, dead-tree newspapers, even if the ink does rub off on your fingers and you need th shlep the damn things out to get recycled once a week. Still, and especially for the Washington Post (still just 35 cents), it's a great bargain. Hands down, the best bit about having a bunch of smart journalists putting together a paper is the idea that you are much more likely to stumble on a story you didn't even know you might be interested in print in than in the online world. Case in point (abeit from a magazine): this week's New Yorker has a lovely little article on pigeon racing. Never would have though I would find it interesting, and I certainly wouldn't have clicked a headline like "Pigeon Racers Worry About Future of Their High-Maintenance Hobby; Homing Pigeon's Skill Still Baffles Science."

Is the Guardian still publishing in oversize broadsheet format? An experiment started a few years ago by The Independent (?) with printing both tabloid and broadsheet versions of the same paper led to a couple of the large-format papers switching entirely to tabloid, if I remember correctly, as they sold more copies that way.

[William Klein]

Thanks, Doc. (And by the way, your name is, as I suspect you already know, an anagram of my own medical moniker. As cult leader Dr. Crab, I lead a growing community of crustacean eaters..but as I say, surely you already knew that.

As for the Guardian, in my earlier rant on this subject (http://www.headlineupdate.com/2005/10/o_guardian_my_g.html) I lamented their new, "Berliner" format, and linked to what some graphic designers had to say about it.
http://www.newsdesigner.com/archives/002259.php

My preferred solution to the problem of declining newspaper readership is to make newspaper reading a mandatory part of the work day. It would make everyone do their jobs better, improve literacy, bolster democracy...sorry, I got carried away.