Opinion: Long live printed newspapers. Digital won’t work for these readers
Printing newspapers every day is a tradition in this country and the one in Europe. Newspapers have often been printed only in the summer months when the heat and humidity make it less difficult to keep things in good condition.
Even without heat, long newsprint days also offer advantages for printers. It’s a more steady, stable surface for printing and the papers are less likely to curl up. The quality of the end product is also better, with a higher saturation and lower color quality.
Printed in full color, newspapers were an innovation in the printing technology, which could otherwise be used only in black-and-white printing. Color quality is also better in color than with black and white printing, so color printing was a great discovery that made sense and is still a good choice today.
Many of these benefits apply to digital newsprint as well, but with new technology, it needs to be reinvented and even if it can be done, it is not desirable because of the advantages of printing newspapers every day.
The advantages of newspapers in the printed form go far beyond the quality of the newspapers. With newspapers in hand, people will start to follow. People are less likely to start following if they have to wait until their morning paper to get a newspaper and are forced to read it for hours on the bus, for example.
The printing of newspapers also provides a unique context around life that people living their lives in the digital age do not have. People will be more likely to make new friends and to have many more social interactions they would otherwise lack.
Newspapers have their own value in this sense. The most prominent newspaper publisher in the world, Rupert Murdoch, has often been accused of having a great conflict of interest. What he does best and what he actually owns are very different. Yet the newspapers he produces are read all over the world.
The most important difference is that newspapers are not just printed copies of the news but they are also a window into the real world through their content, graphics, photography, etc. The printing of newspapers also provides opportunities for visual storytelling that will otherwise be lost in the digital world. In a
