Why Paper Is Eternal - Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press ...

storyline. A few sentences further down in Patinkin’s column, the violin music
rose again: “Call me sentimental, but it’s almost like a friend.” 14
Little wonder that canny observers of the media business suggest it’s
time everyone who still harbors tender feelings about news on paper got over
it. If newspapers are indeed in the downward spiral they appear to be in,
nostalgia won’t save them. Scott Donaton, publisher of Advertising Age, wrote
last year:
“[C]ertain forms of media that are currently print-based,
particularly daily newspapers, must explore the possibility that
there are more reader-friendly and cost-efficient ways to
distribute their content. It’s still surprisingly difficult to get
traditional media executives to admit this. But their resistance
seems based on an emotional attachment to ink on paper, a
deeply held – if largely indefensible – sense that a
newspaper’s soul is inextricably linked to its format.” 15
On the face of it, this makes sense. It’s hard to see any link between the
soul of a newspaper and the paper it’s printed on, assuming that by “soul” we
mean the fundamental values of good journalism, such as timeliness, originality,
accuracy, and fairness. There is nothing obvious about paper that encourages
these values, and in many ways the digital medium makes it easier to honor
them. An online outlet can break a story at any hour (no presses or delivery
trucks holding things up), so timeliness is much simpler to achieve. As for
originality, the Web has a decided edge in that’s it a wholly new world, a
cultural blank slate where original voices and thoughts can appear out of
nowhere and flourish. For a newspaper story to be accurate and fair, it should
include all relevant facts and points of view, and here also online papers have
an advantage: unlimited space or “news hole” to provide context, nuance and
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