Sometimes You Need the Print Version
Posted on David Pierce | 2 Comments
Jack Shafer writes about why he cancelled his New York Times subscription, and then forked over too much money to get it back. Mostly, he said, it’s because it’s not the news without the paper paper:
The researchers found that the print folks “remember significantly more news stories than online news readers”; that print readers “remembered significantly more topics than online newsreaders”; and that print readers remembered “more main points of news stories.” When it came to recalling headlines, print and online readers finished in a draw.
Although the number of readers tested in the study is small—just 45—the paper confirms my print-superiority bias, at least when it comes to reading the Times. The paper explores several theories for why print rules. Online newspapers tend to give few cues about a storys importance, and the “agenda-setting function” of newspapers gets lost in the process. “Online readers are apt to acquire less information about national, international and political events than print newsreaders because of the lack of salience cues; they generally are not being told what to read via story placement and prominence—an enduring feature of the print product,” the researchers write. The paper finds no evidence that the “dynamic online story forms” you know, multimedia stuff have made stories more memorable.
The key thing here, I think, is the importance of context clues. Big headlines mean “please read this, this is important!” There’s not a good way to do that online, especially not at any kind of scale; every story is the same online, and that’s just not right. We need the Times to tell us what’s important, and how important it is.
David Pierce, the founder of Digitizd, is now Reviews Editor at The Verge.
“There’s not a good way to do that online…”? Says who?
I love The Times – the print Times – and agree with everything said about the importance of context for guidance, etc., and would add that the aesthetic appeal of the well-laid-out printed page is a major pleasure as well.
But all we know is that nobody IS providing context in online presentations of multiple news stories – not that it CAN’T be done. I think it’s more of an attitude problem than a difficult challenge to mount, the attitude being about how everyone and everything on the Web (and maybe elsewhere) is or “should be” “equal” blahblahblah. The truth will out – the truth being that not everything is equal.
If the will were there it shouldn’t be so hard to present multiple news stories online with a visual and artistic hierarchy that at least somewhat rivals what can be done on the printed page. In fact, you can already get an exact replica of the printed Times online. I prefer the “real thing,” but couldn’t we get used to navigating through the screen version, and maybe even come to enjoy its benefits (e.g., interactivity and conservation)?
As a home-delivery subscriber to The Times I can access that online replica for free and still choose not to, but it doesn’t seem such a stretch to think that with the proper incentive – financial? paper, fuel or other production- or delivery-related shortage during war? – one could make the transition and become happy with it.
Totally fair – there’s nothing about this that can’t be done, and it’s even being done in pieces by things like the Times Reader and the iPad app. But I think it’s the same as with print magazines–it’s just so much more work to lay everything out to accentuate and contextualize the story. We do it for print because we have to, because we always have and it’s what’s expected, but the pace of the Web doesn’t allow for it yet. But you’re right, though. It’s that it hasn’t been done, not that it can’t be done.