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

assumption being that it doesn’t much matter. The point is preserving
newspapers as profitable enterprises (or, in some models, as charitably
endowed nonprofits) that will continue to produce quality journalism. The
“newspaper” is just an institution, an abstract entity that gathers and distributes
the core product, which is news and other information. The paper it’s printed
on is simply a container for that information, a technology of convenience. If
we replace the old container with a new one, nothing will be lost, as long as the
contents are the same. Whether milk is delivered in a plastic bottle or a waxed
cardboard carton, it’s still milk. So, too, with information, says this argument,
which in the business world is known as the “platform-agnostic” view because
it is indifferent to the vehicle or “platform” used to deliver content. As Daniel
Okrent, the writer and former public editor of The New York Times, once put it:
“The words and pictures and ideas and images and notions and substance that
we produce is what matters – and not the vessel that they arrive in.” 21 If this is
true, there is no reason to feel any attachment to the paper newspaper, or for
that matter any paper medium, other than nostalgia and perhaps aesthetics.
But what if there’s more to it? What if paper somehow influences or
shapes the information that newspapers and other paper media produce? It’s a
strange idea, one that requires us to imagine paper not just as a container of
content, but part of the content itself. If paper’s contribution (whatever that
might be) to the content is valuable, this might explain why traditional
newspapers are having such trouble shedding their digital selves. Perhaps paper
itself endowed newspapers with some meaningful quality that cannot be
replicated in the digital medium as we currently know it.
What would this special quality be? To answer that question, it’s
necessary to think hard about the way people interact with paper – not just
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