The power of print

There was an eerie moment during the last Oxford Geek Night. Russell Davies (no, not that Russell Davies) was telling us that journalists in the print media love to write about Newspaper Club because its focus on printing suggests that newspapers aren’t dead after all. Russell’s response? He played us a sound file with robot voices singing:

We broke your business, now we want your machines.

The statement of intent combined with the creepiness of the voices was enough to send a shiver down my spine – and not just because I was the only person at the Jericho Tavern taking notes in Teeline shorthand. (I was probably the only person using pen and paper at all.)

I was unnerved because my gut reaction was: a) Please don’t let that be true b) It’s true. When I worked at the Oxford Mail, we sometimes gave tours of the office (to school parties, visiting dignitaries, etc). People would show polite interest in the newsroom, but the undisputed highlight of the tour was the giant printing press. Watching it do its thing was just magical. It’s exciting to hold a copy of a newspaper that’s literally hot off the press, especially if you’ve seen it created before your very eyes.

When people talk about “real” newspapers being “better” than online news, they mean they want the physical experience of reading a paper. A paper made of paper. They’re not talking about the content at all. When did you last see a printed newspaper whose content was something really valuable, something that couldn't be found elsewhere? That should have been obvious all along, but it took Russell Davies’s OGN talk to bring it home to me.

I had more to say about the power of print, but this blog post has been sitting in my Drafts folder for ages and I'm just going to post the unfinished version.

By the way, the next Oxford Geek Night is tomorrow (Weds 1st Dec) and features Leila Johnston of Shift Run Stop fame. I hope the snow won't keep anybody away.