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

connection would draw the young. It would be disappointing if they hadn’t
embraced the Web. The question is, are they finding there everything that
paper-based media have always offered? Romenesko, a media-news website run
by the Poynter Institute, recently ran an item under the headline, “I love
journalism, but I have no love for the paper news.” The link led to a piece by
David McRaney of The Student Printz, a student newspaper at the University of
Southern Mississippi. After confessing his loveless feelings about paper,
McRaney continued, “I see it as inferior to the Internet in most of the ways I
prefer to get my information, but I do not think it has no value. The paper
news should provide long-form, in-depth coverage, while the Internet should
be interactive, immediate, provide an open dialog with the audience and throw
in all those nifty doo-dads and videos people love to play with.” 91
This distinction is not so much generational as operational. The digital
medium serves up content differently from paper, and we go to it for different
kinds of reading experiences – “search and destroy” versus “settle down.” It
has little to do with age and everything to do with the human mind, which does
not evolve so quickly that those born after 1980 read and think in a
fundamentally different way from everyone who came before them. In effect,
the content that works best on the Web, for readers of all ages, has migrated
there, while the “long-form, in-depth” stuff clings tenaciously to paper (even
when it’s on the Web, people are less likely to read it there). Thus the public
exodus from newspapers is not a rejection of paper, but an objection to using it
for hard news and other utilitarian, quick-read content (including, not
incidentally, classified ads) that gains little or nothing from arriving in that
format. It’s because this content has always been the core mission of
newspapers – they’re called newspapers, not essaypapers – that the industry finds
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