Try this with your precious LCD screen
There is news, and, for the time being anyway, there are newspapers:
I love reading a paper. I love sitting down with one, unfolding it, scanning headlines, digging into a story, taking some time to process it along with a sip of beverage, flipping the pages and wrestling with them to fold right again, setting it aside knowing I can pick it up later any time I want, learning stuff I didn’t know about places or people I’d never heard of, comics, the rattling sound paper makes when you move it or turn pages, the way I learned when I was young to use one finger as a fulcrum to fold it in half and tuck under my arm, the image I get of Al Bundy doing exactly that with a smile on his face as he heads upstairs to reclaim his bathroom…
And I love how they provide a depth of information and context that TV can’t match (and which anchor personalities Chip Cappedteeth and Brenda Botox most likely wouldn’t understand anyway). Time has changed, the calendar pages have turned and some of those things I love about newspapers are probably going to become part of the past. [Dan] Rather’s right that this situation can be seen as a crisis. There are important dimensions of news we won’t get if newspapers leave. But he’s also wrong, because they’re far too important to leave up to a panel of experts picked by the same kind of people who run the Post Office or Department of Motor Vehicles.
Is this where I admit to actually reading the bridge column?
I do have some games I play with the paper, especially on Friday, when I try to guess which of the debuting films will be reviewed by George Lang and which will be farmed out to a wire-service scribe. And I never did figure out who “Mr. Monday” was: my best guess was that both Tramel and Carlson wrote versions of it, which were printed out one sentence at a time, and then sentences were randomly selected (pulled out of a hat?) until the space was filled.
Lynn »
14 August 2009 · 7:49 am
I hate wrestling with a newspaper to get it folded just right, I hate the way they turn my fingers black and hate having them laying around the house when no one’s reading them. I don’t mind paying for it if I have to, as long as I can read it on my nice neat LCD screen.
McGehee »
14 August 2009 · 8:15 am
That was the part that made me want to drop our dead-tree subscription the last time renewal came up. After prolonged intra-household negotiation, we’re still taking the paper, but they don’t hang around nearly as long as they used to.
The ink stains never bothered me so much, and the ad circulars do come in handy once in a while. But what I would really miss if newspapers disappeared entirely would be the chance to pick one up on vacation in some town far from home, and page through the chronicle of life in that place. The computer screen just doesn’t offer the immersion necessary for the full experience.
Maybe if I liked living here more, I’d still read the local paper sitting on the couch instead of at my computer desk.
CGHill »
14 August 2009 · 8:29 am
If it can be had without too much difficulty, I always snag a copy of the local paper during the World Tours. (More often than not, there’s a rack at the hotel.) Much more relevant to what I’m doing than USA Today, even if they give it away.
sya »
14 August 2009 · 9:41 am
When portable reading devices get as a cheap as a calculator, newspapers (in their paper form) will definitely be obsolete. (People probably had these same conversations when they were trying to convert stone tablets to papyrus.)
McGehee »
14 August 2009 · 10:09 am
What I’d like to see is for news sites — whether originally newspapers or not — to compose their daily content as if it were in fact going to press like a newspaper (complete with paid ads), but post it up as a PDF so those who want to print it out can do so at their own expense. In the prevailing model, after all, the per-copy price doesn’t cover the entire cost of publication, so this ought to be a more affordable alternative.
Of course, I’d prefer the ads be local, though the potential for worldwide distribution might complicate that some. Still, most of those interested in a given locality’s news should be local as well.
CGHill »
14 August 2009 · 10:38 am
The Oklahoman is already offering something like that.
McGehee »
14 August 2009 · 3:03 pm
Hmmm, not bad. I could be wrong but I thought PDF documents, when viewed on the computer, could be designed to include web links that open just like in a web browser, thus incorporating “bonus content” just like the “desktop” version. If that’s not available it ought to be — hey Adobe!.
I couldn’t determine from that link whether, after the free trial period expires, a digital-delivery subscriber still has access to both versions.
Dick Stanley »
14 August 2009 · 6:50 pm
We of the recovering newspaper hoards (i.e. retirees) and those who continue to slave over the cold type (my wife among them) thank you for your obeisance.
CGHill »
14 August 2009 · 7:37 pm
You can indeed set a clickable link in a PDF, though in my current installation (Reader 8.1.6) Adobe will ask you if you really want to go there.
canadienne »
15 August 2009 · 11:01 am
Sadly we have stopped subscribing to the local paper, due to the enormous piles of paper we were hauling to the recycle bin weekly. I admit to getting breaking news from Twitter – I follow a couple of breaking news sources like the CBC, CNN, and the local paper, all of which are excellent. Also RSS feeds from a larger number of sources. Also our local CBC station has excellent local news coverage. I do miss the paper experience, but I don’t think I’m missing any news.
I’d be totally willing to pay money to the local paper to unlock further content, and I’m thinking this might be a viable way for them to make money without the cost of distributing all those dead trees. I’ve been planning to investigate if I can pay for digital content without having to actually get paper (yes, it’s an environmental concern. I’m a tedious granolahead.)
And it’s very easy to include clickable links (also hypertext links to other pages, and video, sound files, and other goodies) in PDF’s. You can make PDF’s that behave like websites. At work, we have started using Acrobat instead of Powerpoint for presentations. If you start with InDesign, it’s very easy to put together multimedia PDF’s. I guess the the little warning is a security feature- I’ve been meaning to figure out if you can turn it off.