Connecting With Print

I read with a mix of emotions about the decision to publish The Daily Princetonian on paper once a week, while continuing daily online publication (On the Campus, October issue). 

Online reading now seems the default mode, not just for newspapers but for most printed material. Electronic print brings convenience, beyond being cheaper to produce. Paper, due to the finality of its finished version, requires human labor that e-copy does not. E-copies, further, allow for publication of a wider berth and distribution of stories since the physical constraints of a “page” do not matter online.

Yet, succumbing to the convenience of reading online has its costs: We lose not just the tactile connection to the paper, but also the privacy of reading without being tracked. And though paper newspapers and e-newspapers are both mediums that provide news, paper allows more time to think, consider, and reflect, in private, while e-versions bombard us with immediacy — get it now, respond now, have your interests and responses tracked, in the blink of an eye. Perhaps e-versions are more precisely up to date. But what, really, do we lose if we disconnect for an evening and discover new developments in the morning? 

I imagine the decision to print even a weekly paper version of the Prince is a sort of principled stand to avoid a complete subsummation of “paper news” to the ether. 

I am mailing this letter via snail mail, though it will be “late.”