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

depth. As Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism,
has put it: “Once you let go emotionally, you realize that as journalism, online
is infinitely superior to print, in its ability to offer links to other material,
original documents, full texts of interviews, video, and as much statistical
backup as the reader can stand.” 16
For the news consumer, online newspapers have many distinct
advantages over paper ones, first and foremost convenience. <strong>Why</strong> go to the
trouble of having an ungainly sheaf of paper delivered to your house each
morning – retrieving it from the driveway, working your way through the inky
pages, storing it for recycling – when you can call up exactly the same content on
the screen nearest you, without all that bother, and in most cases for free? 17
If that’s all there is to it, if journalists and readers are both better served
by digital delivery of news, then the answer is obvious: Every newspaper should
follow the “world’s oldest” and move wholesale to the Web. Indeed, the
obvious question is why hasn’t this happened yet. The answer, in part, is brutal
economic reality. Most newspapers haven’t figured out to make as much
money from publishing with electrons as they made (and still make) from
vending “ink on crushed wood.” 18 Charging fees for digital content doesn’t
work in most cases because the public has come to think of online news as a
free commodity. And though advertising on the Web is growing rapidly, for
newspaper publishers it is not yet producing income comparable to what ads
on paper bring in. 19
There are many proposed ways out of this fix, new business models that
are debated at the conferences and panels where newspaper people gather. 20 In
these discussions, the format in which newspapers might be saved – on paper,
online or in some hybrid arrangement – is an open question, the basic
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