Only the News That’s Fit to Print
The enduring value of the print newspaper and what happens after it’s dead
I’m rarely compelled to purchase a print copy (a tome) of the Sunday New York Times, but when the United States eclipsed a COVID-19 death toll of one hundred thousand people, the paper recognized the unique gravity of the moment better than the President, cable news and the internet combined. I was breath-taken as I unfolded the front page on the last Sunday in May of 2020: U.S. DEATHS NEAR 100,000, AN INCALCULABLE LOSS.
That cover of pure and uninterrupted text was a first for the modern Times and a worthy homage to the equally unprecedented tragedy the human race is collectively experiencing that few mediums could more appropriately express. It forced emotions of sadness, anger, and overwhelm, commensurate to the immense gravity of the situation in a way only a spread of newsprint, not a Tweet or digital article, could convey. As the unique cover memorialized the moment we find ourselves in, it also begs a question about a future with another unprecedented crisis where print newspapers could very well be extinct.
Questions about a future without the daily print edition aren’t posed very often by a society that has all but eradicated it, yet we find ourselves grappling with the reality that developments in social media and the internet can meaningfully shape civic and political realities (e.g. Russia, fake news and the 2016 election) and shape our perception of the world. I’m not a media theorist, and while the recent evolution of information consumption is complicated, my own quest toward intellectually-sound news reading has hi-lighted a fundamental outcome of digitalizing and applying social media to news consumption: a loss of the idea that journalistic institutions, especially papers of record, do not publish content in isolation. That is, along with each piece of news a paper publishes, there exists a semblance of normative context for history, the present situation, and existential relevance to helps us interpret it, understand what’s important, filter out what we should care about, and decide how to respond. This is a value proposition missing from today’s digital news-reading norms, but it was central to the brute force effectiveness of the historic Sunday Times cover and underpins the enduring value of the print edition of the newspaper.
These institutions aren’t perfect and worthy of ongoing critique, but for young people like myself, this loss of context is profound, because while we have more information than ever, we probably have less firsthand context than ever, and we find ourselves stuck in our echo chambers of social media and naive consumption habits that have come to characterize the time. Until now, we hadn’t experienced true crisis à la 9/11 or a World War, and we never had to work hard to get the latest scoop on the world because a stream of diverse information is now the default. But not even generational wisdom has been sheltered from this loss: we’re all experiencing a collapse of context in our digital-enabled view reality, and in some cases an outright manipulation it. This gravely complicates the personal task of sharping our own understanding of truth and the state of the world.
This phenomenon could be, in part, described as “content collapse”, a modification of the theory of “context collapse” in social media where the collapse refers to the blurring of the lines between social groups and consolidation of an individual’s internet identity which could could be argued as the collapse of the boundaries between the types of content and a scrubbing of the identity and character of information: reporting vs opinion, real vs fake news, social and social opining vs journalism, and the normative context that internet has degraded
It wasn’t just that the headlines, free-floating, decontextualized motes of journalism ginned up to trigger reflexive mouse clicks, had displaced the stories. It was that the whole organizing structure of the newspaper, its epistemological architecture, had been junked. The news section (with its local, national, and international subsections), the sports section, the arts section, the living section, the opinion pages: they’d all been fed through a shredder, then thrown into a wind tunnel. What appeared on the screen was a jumble, high mixed with low, silly with smart, tragic with trivial. The cacophony of the RSS feed, it’s now clear, heralded a sea change in the distribution and consumption of information. The new order would be disorder
Nicholas Carr “From Context Collapse to Content Collapse”
Even if one limits their consumption to the publishers’ websites and mobile apps, they still face a collapse of context on an endless, stacked twitter timeline, Facebook newsfeed, news aggregating feed, or dynamic front page with live updates, defined more by the recency of publication and personal interest, fascination, or the trappings of a Twitter mob, rather than normative and holistic importance.
The context problem could be largely solved if one just read everything that a newspaper of record offers each day and carefully judges each piece of content alongside its peers as it’s published. Practically, this is impossible, so we have to make compromises, the most straightforward of which is simply consuming less news. That’s what everybody does. It is a matter of consuming less news tactically such that one still give proper credence to the stories that deserve it and process it all with adequate context.
For the layperson to guarantee a holistic yet abbreviated reading of the news on the internet, however, they require background and focus–politically, socially, historically, scientifically, and economically–to justly weight the onslaught of reporting across an intimidating spread of a national and international crisis. Naturally, we still depend on and appreciate professional journalists to find and report facts and requisite opinions. So while we would never produce “journalism” or find and analyze the pure facts ourselves, we happily attempt to contextualize it ourselves (or fail to even try).
Print readers enjoy the implicit luxury of having a professional that guarantees the opportunity to consume information with proper context. Because while the layperson isn’t a professional at current events, news editors are. The editors of the journalist institutions that carefully craft their print newspaper editions have solved the firehose problem while preserving superior context: the purest medium in which professional journalists and editors express their historic craft, and it’s called the print newspaper.
It’s not just mechanics of information curation editorial consistency that provides rich context and meaning to the news. Print allows you to read between the lines. With different font sizes, capitalization, spatial layout, starkly different from the design metadata of a tweet or typical news site: all caps or not. If you’ve read a print newspaper with any consistency, it’s not hard to recognize an unspoken yet consistent design language that creates a reliable news-reading experience. You could say that it’s a rebuilding of the bounders between content and the provision of context. That Sunday Times article infused more emotion and perspective than any article though a screen could ever have. These things are subjective, but they’re consistent, and we can garner context from consistency.
In a positive turn for print, the “digital print” edition of most newspapers do a pretty good job of this, and developments in web and mobile technology are enabling a more seamless digital print experience. The editorial curation and design elements of print journalism are preserved, and there is a great opportunity to build a digital news product that captures the benefits of print while still making it accessible digitally, and especially on the screen sizes of mobile devices. The value propositions that make print critical, after all, don’t rely on a physical medium, so if we solve this problem with technology, we’ve not only restored context to the news, we’ve made that context accessible at a greater scale and not just those who can afford to or tolerate reading a print newspaper every day.
So the most important question of print’s death is whether or not this problem will be solved before the final nail in the coffin, or even more practically, will the digital-print edition die with the physical-print edition. For the death to outpace a proper replacement is probably the most-likely bad scenario, because while there will be a user base who continue to read a digital print edition, the real death or print is not due to a change in just a preference for a digital screen, but a preference for real-time, easily digestible content, two value propositions still not satisfied by a simple digital print edition. Admittedly, this situation would really only serve a detriment to current and future print readers, so the question is whether we will see the revival of print’s value proposition in a new way that aligns with and provides additional, significant value to the average newsreader. Even with their unique status, news publishers, after all, have no onus to build something that consumers don’t actually want, beyond whatever intrinsic obligation they hold as a cornerstone of democracy.
It’s important to note that the downfall of print and hope for our solving that problem with technology does not imply the eventual wholesale replacement of journalistic institutions altogether. We are not yet at a point (and may never reach it in our lifetimes) where technology should replace editorial functions altogether. The need for an editor with institutional responsibility, even if publishing purely online, can’t be solved by technology or a new model for truth and accountability. The editorial process is still a distinctly human and critical-thought process that has been demonstrated countless times by public squares where human editors and institutional responsibility is absent.
What is perhaps encouraging is the ways in which the major papers are already changing proactively. The rise of digital killed (and will kill many papers), and in some respect, those deaths could be seen as failures to adapt products and business models quickly enough. Failing to adapt and being rapidly killed is one way to lose a product. Another way is to not adapt proactively and swing the pendulum violently to the other direction with no preparation or time for forethought (e.g. to kill the print edition one day and have nothing to replace it with). From the product perspective, major publishers are rising to the basic challenge of adapting the print edition to the digital space with mobile-optimized experiences and digital-print and pseudo-print editions of the paper. Perhaps the proactivity of it all will allow the transition to be one that preserves the important, nuanced value propositions of the print edition of the newspaper..
Like people my age, I read my news digitally, and I’m admittedly publishing this digitally, but I do oftentimes find myself drawn to print every week. One observation, in actively spending time with both the print and digital editions of The New York Times is perhaps more thought-provoking than actionable, but nonetheless: nowhere on nytimes.com the iconic seven words appear, as they do every single day in the print edition of the times since 1897: “All the News that’s fit to print”. It’s not to suggest that there is news published on nytimes.com that isn’t indeed fit to print on its merits of good journalism, but perhaps because it’s not fit to print on the basis of its importance relative to the rest of the print edition. Amid a defining moment of the past century, it is precisely the news that’s fit to print that I want to be delivered, just to know what the hell is going on.
