Do You Remember The Value Of Print?

There has been a dramatic loss in the value of print news in our world. It has become common knowledge, albeit wrong, that digital communication is in all ways superior to traditional media formats like print news. Print is looked down upon by anybody in the digital media space, which is pretty much everybody now. Even actual physical printing shops at least have a website. Most are “on social media” too, which puts them closer to the side of their own destructors. This trend simply has to stop. It may be impossible to function in the modern world without internet access. But that doesn’t mean that the internet is the sole or most important venue for communicating in the world.

Here’s a stark example of how important print news is to preserving journalism for the people rather than complementing the growth of the journalism business itself: The New York Times’ retraction list (online) is behind their paywall. That means even if they were dead ass wrong about 100% of a free article you read from NYT, you won’t find out unless you a) pay them, and b) read online. I’ve not read a NYT in physical format in a long time, so I wouldn’t know how often the print retractions physically.

But the value of print, which is now lost on most people, is that you might own that paper. The paper which potentially has a mistake in it had to have been manufactured & produced, rather than simply published online. That means you can hold it in your hands and no matter what NYT might want to convince you of, you can prove that they published certain information on certain days, right or wrong.

Online Publishers Lie All The Time, About The Smallest Of Things

When an online publisher publishes something, they can actually even change the date that is displayed on it. This means they can lie about when they broke news. Unlike Twitter.com, there is actually an edit button on every blog post that allows the writer to change things. Those changes are not readily apparent to anybody, and might not be included in any retractions. Therefore, a publisher could technically be wrong, miss all the right scoops, but edit their blog quickly enough to look right on. That is just impossible with print. That is at least 1 major value of print.

There is also a different sense of reverence with respect to physical print mail. The value of print is built into the fact that it is physically made, and distributed. Published media online is just there. They may advertise it to you, but you can delete an email NYT sends you. You don’t have to go on any social media sites where the news is marketed. Nobody forces you with a gun to your head to visit any news publisher’s website either. The internet is still that kind of free.

You Can Still Lie In Print, But It’s Harder To Get Away With

I am not so naive as to think that the news business was totally honest or fair in their coverage prior to the age of the internet. But the more the value of print is degraded, and reduced, the worse your news will be. The anti-competitive nature of NYT & Gannett, 2 publicly traded news groups, is another problem. In an era where printing was still commonplace, or expected, this would be more difficult for corrupt enterprises to take over. Perhaps papers should be marketing longer format content which is available online, and certainly online news shouldn’t be stopped or censored. Yet, there is enough evidence of falsifications from the news business, that it in general now is in need of correction.

The value of print must be restored in some way, and the news industry must be held accountable. For the people who don’t know what being held accountable in this sense would mean, I’ll tell you exactly. A vast majority of the news industry workers must be fired/laid off. Executives who have been involved in actual censorship (not the reverse promotion of things with fake censorship claims like Hunter’s laptop nonsense) should be taken to court for falsely representing themselves as members of the free press. It has become far too commonplace for politically motivated, financially corrupted individuals to join journalistic enterprises just to keep them in place as anti-competitive socialist knowledge suppressors.

Just because you are employed by NYT does not magically make every single thing you do “journalism” by proxy. If you worked at NYT and attended riots (as a rioter) and destroyed property, you weren’t reporting on a story. You were using the press as cover for your agenda. I have personally reached tens of thousands of reporters with tips on the most monumental stories of our time. Every single one of them has ignored this, not one single one of them has reported on my efforts, and all of them have wasted the public’s time with Qanon shaman and other people they cast as people of interest. This genuinely would be harder to perpetuate in a print format, because the pictures would be so obviously repeated. The stories would be so clearly recycled, people might eventually just stop buying the paper.

The “Free Press” Isn’t The Same Thing As “Free (Ad-Sponsored) News”

But “free news” or ad-sponsored news being the majority of what permeates the internet has corroded the public’s expectations. No news organization should be able to use the term “breaking news” to lead-in to the same story at the beginning of every hour of programming. That is a lie. Things only break as news once. If you missed it because you weren’t watching Bloomberg at 10am, you missed it when it broke. The value of print would be evident with respect to breaking news, because it could really only reasonably happen once. If most breaking news were broken via print, and then discussed or developed on television and the internet, that might make sense. How many stories are so truly important they ought to interrupt any “regularly scheduled broadcast?” Honestly, so few…especially compared to whatever passes for breaking news these days. You don’t know that because the value of print is so low.

I publish paper stickers with messages on them and leave them up for free all over financial districts to attract attention from people who are typically nose-down in their phone reading empty digital news. It has proven to be a very valuable practice. People definitely understand the value of print; believe you me.