Print is dead, long live print

I often catch up on the NiemanLab predictions in January after they have all dropped. But the trend here caught my eye:

Aimee Rinehart - A renewed appetite for print

Esther Kezia Thorpe - The print revival comes to news

Simon Allison - News websites hit an evolutionary dead end

And one would think the lobbyists from “Big Forest” were at work by the mini-resurgence of the “print” discussion this year:

March: How print got cool again

June: The Enduring Power of Print

July: Despite move toward digital formats, the power of print endures

My interest in the topic is summarized in the title of a 2019 conference paper, written with colleague Shuhua Zhou, Print Newspapers Are Dead, Long Live The Cognitive Support For News Consumers Embodied In The Conventions Of Print Design.

We argued there and in two papers in 2021 that the print newspaper is an expertly curated and aggregated package of news, designed for efficient reading, learning, and understanding.

The web, in contrast, is a complete mess where both the discovery and consumption of news imposes a significant tax on a reader’s effort to follow and make sense of events. Print is not a better delivery model economically, but it may be a better reader experience and teacher.

No one is (or at least should not be) pining for a return to the “golden age” of newspapers. Print as a delivery mechanism for daily news is dead and those print editions remaining in 10 years will be niche exceptions.

But the value that print represents to even digitally savvy readers is unmistakable and is something I have been thinking about since product managing the PDF e-edition at the Boston Globe 10 years ago.

Around 2011, when we built the subscription-based BostonGlobe.com, splitting it off from the free Boston.com, researchers heard two requests from readers:

1. On the homepage I want to see the latest news, updated constantly.
2. On the homepage I want to see the news that is on the front page of the print newspaper.

Since one page can’t do both things, we compromised. The homepage serves the latest news, as it occurs throughout the day. The "Today’s Paper" page serves up the news the publication selects as the most important that day - once a day. For readers, one approach is more self-serve and requires continuous attention and maintenance throughout the day. The other relies more explicitly on the expert judgement of news editors, but the task demands significantly less time and effort to consume.

Researchers would say that the packaged “edition” of ‘Today’s Paper’ affords a reader need for “completeness,” the psychological reward of finishing a task and checking the box. The affordances of print and digital news provide different benefits for different readers. But we argue the design and organizational features of print may be a better match for the specific context of news and similar types of information.

Among the other signals we studied, most are present in both formats but are often attenuated in digital, including:

• Importance - is this a “must read” or just “next-day” coverage?
• Genre - is it news or opinion?
• Wayfinding - how do I even find the story I am looking for?
• Retrievability - once I find the story, if I put down the paper/website how do I find it again tomorrow?
• Browsability - how easy is it to scan the day’s news and select articles of interest?
• Serendipity - how often when browsing can I find stories of unexpected relevance?

So as print editions expire, we are not looking to invest in paper mills, but we are wondering which of the psychological benefits of “print” have been lost in the transition to digital news, and how do we recreate that value on the web?

The two papers from 2021. Email if you need access:

Zhou, S., Kiesow, D., & Guo, L. (2021). The Values of Print: Affordances and Sensemaking for Newspaper Consumers. Journalism Practice, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2021.1910984

Kiesow, D., Zhou, S., & Guo, L. (2021). Affordances for Sense-Making: Exploring Their Availability for Users of Online News Sites. Digital Journalism, 0(0), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2021.1989316