All The News That's Fit to Print

 Printing is a dying industry and that is a shame. My grandfather and father spent their careers making it possible for things to be printed and the most vivid memory of my youth is the smell of printer's ink. The family legend is that I sat in a bucket of it as a baby. Maybe that is why, pardon the pun, it is an indelible memory for me. But today, a friend told me that the public library is about to suspend the subscription to the New York Times in favor of its online counterpart. I feel for my friend who is a Luddite and will likely go to his grave as a paper-only reader. 

I also live in this century and know that the likelihood that printed news, magazines, and books are going the way of greeting cards. Still, I admire my friend petitioning the library to keep the NYT on their shelves. My friend is often the person who seeks to stem the tide of change and has won some and lost some across the years.

The masthead of the NYT has proclaimed for a very long time that it publishes "All the news that's fit to print." However, with so much effort going into an online presence, how long will it be before that line is modified to "All the content that is fit to publish"? Printing by its nature requires paper and ink, but in these times, we have no interest in smells and sounds--we prefer our news in binary code and delivered to devices in "chunks" and not actual stories. We want to be informed, but not informed readers.

We are a nation of skimmers and surfers, not deep divers of what will be lining the bottom of virtual birdcages. Printing requires planning and machinery and art. Publishing requires far less effort and talent. We still need the writers and editors, but we have automated the rest in our need to publish quickly and make a buck.