The Slow Death of Printed Newspapers, and why it's a Problem.

There was a piece in The Guardian the other day about switching from print to digital newspapers... and then back again.  It's rather Proustian and elegaic in its tone: Stephen Curry writes that, having bought a paper copy of his newspaper,

I sat at the kitchen table with the paper spread out and immersed myself.  The pleasures are simple and deep and have yet to be reproduced on any screen that I have used.  Browsing is easier and feels more natural than with a… browser.  Despite the ease of search that computerised versions offer, you have more command of the content as the eye ranges across a double-page spread, skimming the headlines and noting those stories that you will return to read in full.  And you know where you are with a paper newpaper.  By which I mean you know where you are in the story and how far you have to go.  I was relieved to escape the seemingly endless scolling that disorients digital reading. 

There was also pleasure in the physicality of the interaction.  I had not lost the skill of whipping the wide bundle of sheets to initiate a fold, or the knack of pulling out creases and shaping the page to frame the article selected for attention.  And those muscle memories brought to mind other recollections – an instant reconnection with a childhood in Ballymena that bears the imprint of newsprint.  My father, a dentist in the town, picked up the Irish Times and the Guardian on his walk to work, to peruse in his lunch break and bring home at the end of the day.  In the evening the Belfast Telegraph would thud onto the mat at the front door.

Told you it was elegaic, didn't I?

I think he misses something, though, which occurred to me as I was reading his article (online, natch).  What you don't get with digital newspapers is serendipity.  It's easy to search for things that you want to read; but that means that you're less likely to read things that you didn't want to read but were glad you read - things, I susppose, that you didn't know you wanted to read.

You don't have as much control with the dead-tree press.  That's a good thing.  The alternative is that one is much more likely only ever to read things that confirm one's view, or that are "relevant" to one's life; one stays in one's own information bubble.  (This, incidentally, also provides a defence of the library and the bookshop, both for leisure and academic purposes: giving students the URL of a paper will take them directly to it, and so reduce the chance that they'll look at the table of contents of different editions of a journal and read something out of sheer interest; providing a scanned chapter from a book, or typing a search into Amazon, saves everyone from reading the book that's on the shelf next to it - and so condemns them to not reading it by the same token.)

So when Curry says that, with the newsprint version of a paper, "you have more command of the content as the eye ranges," I think he's wrong - and I think that it's good that he's wrong.  (Or, even if he's correct, I reject the value he imputes to that control.)  In leafing through an actual paper, you eye can be caught by an interesting headline, or picture; you take in half a sentence and follow it up, and sometimes you learn something about the world that you wouldn't have learned otherwise.  It's not impossible to browse an electronic version - but it's harder.  And in having to work for it, you lose the serendipity that is the whole point.

One of the things that I miss with the decline of the Indy, which I only ever bought on a Saturday, was reading the book reviews over a slow breakfast on a Sunday.  I've added any number of titles to my wishlist on the basis of that that I would never before have considered, or even encountered, otherwise.  And you can put a hot plate of oatcakes on a newspaper without having to worry about the damage that might be done to it by molten cheese, too.

What goes for book reviews goes, pari passu, for the parts of a newspaper that are probably quite a lot more important than books.  Of course, exposure to things that one would not otherwise have read is imperfect even with an actual newspaper, since the editor does preselect them for you - in choosing the Indy over, say, The Times or the Express, I narrowed my focus a little - but, still.

I am not the first person to worry that internet searches may only tell us what we want to hear.  But it'd not occurred to me that the printed press might be at least part of the solution to that problem.  An imperfect one, to be sure, since one chooses one's newspaper according to one's tastes; but a part of it.

If the printed press is in decline, we shouldn't mourn it (just) for Curry's essentially sentimental reasons.  We should be concerned in other ways, too.