All the media (including newspapers) tell us that the idea of newsprint published daily is (or soon will be) extinct. I wasn’t thinking about that as I arose at my usual early Sunday hour, and checked out the news from The Washington Post and the LA Times online. It kept me occupied until I walked to the mailbox at 6:30 a.m. to pick up the New York Times and the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Between the 6:45 coffee lingering over the headlines, to the 7:15 oatmeal (raisins, granola and blueberries), I devoured information that was both relevant and oddly tactile – including newsprint smudges that had to be periodically removed from my fingers.
And over the course of the day, between some grocery shopping, snow blower preparation and garden cleanup, I returned to those ancient tablets to catch up on the LSU/Alabama game, the plight of Ivy League legacy students, and the wizard behind LinkedIn (and maybe the next big internet thing). At 4:00pm on Sunday, I found myself exploring my next literary excursions in the Times Book Review.
Couldn’t I have done this all online? My laptop/iPad/Windows Phone 7 can each access all of this information (as it had done for me in my pre-6:30 browsing) – so why didn’t I use one of those? Part of it is surely generational (I hate that!). But there is another part that lends itself to the tactile experience – newspaper in hand, coffee steaming on the table, and the ability to immediately return to the source – where you left off. No searching, no dark screens to revive, no scrolling with anything but your eyes.
New media has always been heralded as the sudden and immediate victor over the old media: telephone over telegraph; fax over telex; internet over broadcast television (and radio, and print). But old media is like an elephant - it takes a long time to die. And the reason it does, is that new media focuses on one or a few attributes of the old, but not all of them. For example, the internet provides unlimited access to content, but not always in the way that families wanted to consume it, gathered around a coffee table and bowl of popcorn on a Saturday night.
And so today, the walk up the hill to the mailbox, the coffee steaming on a fall morning, and the transfer of information from more knowledgeable people than I continues to be part of a centuries old tradition, one not dead by a long shot.
