I can’t even describe how much joy last week’s print issue brought me, as the first print issue of The Stute since March 6, 2020. To be able to physically hold something that myself and the Stute staff created was so incredibly fulfilling and rich, something I have been missing desperately over the past year.
In April of this year, I wrote that The Stute should begin to think more about digital and online production, which I still agree with. But after last week I’ve been thinking more about what makes print so great, and here are a few reasons.
The most obvious reason why print may be so effective is that it is physical. It’s an object, a thing, something you can hold in your hand. You can pick it up, pass it to someone else, flip through it, and throw it away. Stacks of papers are around campus in racks or on ledges (locations of which we are still trying to figure out after so much time away) that you can see as you walk around Stevens. On campus, a print paper stands out, whereas online, our website might blend in to others.
Similar to books, papers being physical offer context, which to me is the biggest appeal. Like chapters in a book, content in print newspapers seems to live somewhere. Content is adjacent to other content which can be replicated online but rarely with the same experience. A single news article on thestute.com read alone can be read completely differently in the context of other news articles in the print paper. A particular website design that takes context into consideration might make this digital problem go away – the front page of nytimes.com is a good example, but as soon as you click on an article you lose some of that context. There’s nothing like the feeling of context you get from print.
Honestly, I think these positives make a strong argument for keeping print, but of course there are some things that print doesn’t offer. A big one is hyperlinking which we’ve been spoiled with this past year without print. Blue, underlined text yells “click me!” on the internet and can even replace some written explanation; inserting a hyperlink to show where you got a statistic is sometimes easier than trying to describe it using words. How do you make “read more about it here,” hyperlinking “here” work in print? Are footnotes a solution? Is there a solution? Who knows.
Another issue: corrections. The traditional way to do it is to reserve a space in print to address mistakes in the previous issue that were found. We do this at The Stute (check page 2!) and online, we insert something like this after the sentence that contains the error: (Correction: There were 35 students at the protest, not 25.) There’s no way to insert this kind of correction in print – instead, corrections and articles are separated by an entire issue and are thus difficult to piece together.
But something interesting about online corrections is that people have looked towards print as the standard – even though a major benefit of online content is the ability to change it at any moment, newspapers don’t do that. Instead, they resort to inserting something like (Correction: …) as I mentioned before. In print, you can’t just change some words around if you find an error after it’s printed, and there should be consistency in online versions of the same content. I love that.
So it’s a slippery slope. There are things in print content that should be translated to online content, as well as the other way around. Neither of them are the perfect way to publish a newspaper, but I think with time The Stute can figure out ways to make one of them the most effective for what we need.
The Stute Editorial is an Opinion column written by the current Editor in Chief of The Stute to address and explain editorial decision making, discuss news and media issues, and develop a sense of trust and transparency between readers and members of The Stute.
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