There’s been a lot talk going around lately about New Media vs Traditional Media, and when I say “lately” I mean the past 10 years or so. Everyone knows that online is the way of the future; print journalism is a dying art and online journalism continues to get better with age.
No doubt it’s because I’m studying Online Journalism this semester but I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately and to be perfectly honest, I feel blue. Of course I’ll admit that online journalism is a great medium; it’s where I get the majority of my news and information and to be honest I’d be at a loss without it. That being said though, it’s time to make a confession... I love print. Print is my first love, the one constant that has carried me through from childhood to adulthood.
It started with books. My mum would tuck me in every night and read me one of my favourite stories until I fell asleep. I would make her read them over and over until I had memorised every word so that I didn’t ever really “learn” how to read, I just matched the words on the page with the ones in my head until I recognise letters and sounds and understand the phonetics.
As I got older I buried my head in books and magazines for hours at a time, wasting whole afternoons with Jem and Scout and lazy weekends with Elizabeth and Mr Darcy. Now that I’m at uni juggling a full-time degree and a part-time job I don’t read books as much as I used to because I simply don’t have the time. I’m still an avid reader of magazines though and buy at least one a week. Like books, I love everything about them. I like the smell and the feel of the different papers; the clean gloss of a magazine and the aged musty smell of an old book. I like folding down the pages to mark my place and underlining words and sentences that I want to remember.
I know there’s nothing I can do about the decline of print but I truly hope it never completely fades. Real books and magazines offer a kind of comfort you can’t get from iBooks or other similar apps and curling up with your iPad just doesn’t have the same feel to it.
Magazines like Vogue and Harpers Bazaar already have amazing online counterparts that generate user traffic numbers far higher than their monthly print circulation. However, it’s just not the same. Photo shoots, fonts, and layout all look better in print then they do online and I can’t bring myself to commit to their online equivalents while I can still get the real thing.
Maybe it was a bad idea to sing the praises of print and mourn my descent into the online world in my last blog post for Online Journalism ... On the other hand, this post could be considered as my final surrender. I’ve been so resistant when it comes to online anything. I had no desire to learn, seek, or explore the online world and this subject has actually opened my eyes to a lot of new possibilities when it comes to the web. So this is the deal for now: I’ll concede to the fact that online is where we are headed and that print will continue to decline. I’ll engage more with online options like vogue.com and iBooks; I might even try reading a book online (that was hard to type, I don’t know if I can really do it). I will do all that but I will also continue to buy my newspaper from the newsagent every morning and pay for my monthly subscription to all my favourite magazines. I will fold pages, breath in the smell of ink and fall asleep with a book in my hand until there are no books left in the world. I’ll change from a life dedicated to print, to a life split between the two and when print finally does die I promise I’ll give my full commitment to the online world.
Ps. I do recognise the irony in giving you links to the online version of all my favourite books and magazine.
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