By Sree Sreenivasan
DNAinfo Contributing Editor
For all the time I spend talking about Twitter, Facebook and other digital journalism tools, I am a newspaper and magazine guy at heart. I believe there's still something magical about print.
My most productive mornings are when I get up early enough to hear the thud of the papers landing outside our Manhattan apartment door. I read the A section of the Wall Street Journal first, because that's what my wife likes to take on her commute. I then have all day to read the New York Times and the rest of the Journal sections.
But print's got a lot of problems these days, including the threat of being completely replaced by some type of gadget. But that won't be if immediate concern to print publishers until devices such as the much-hyped Apple iPad can travel to all five Bs — bedroom, bus, beach, boardroom, and, yes, bathroom.
Beyond that, other issues are going to decide how long print will last. Chief among them: cost. Subscriptions can be among the first things cut when people tighten their belts during tough economic times. Another is time, as in who's got time to read? Piled-up magazines (you should see our pile) is a reason often cited by those who cancel magazine subscriptions.
None of these, however, was the reason why I recently went a week without newspapers. My family and I went to Florida last week and our hotel didn't provide newspaper service. It wasn't easy to get one at a newsstand, either.
Here are some thoughts about the media landscape after a week of withdrawal.
Newspapers can really be an addiction: I use the word "withdrawal" because those of us who love print can find it extremely difficult to start our day without a newspaper. My wife needs her tea to get going, I need my newspaper. It took all the willpower I had to not hunt down a paper, off someone's lawn if necessary.
The digital experience can be very good, if you visit the right places — and invest the time: Between DNAinfo (of course) and my quick visits to a handful of sites, I more or less knew what was going on, but I was still in the dark about many things that happended during the week. Turns out keeping up with the news online requires a serious time commitment.
Your online friends will help you keep you abreast of the news: My friends, knowing I was not reading newspapers or even spending much time online, spent a lot of their time sharing links with me via Facebook, Twitter and e-mail. They wanted to make sure I wasn't out of the loop. I know other folks who deliberately don't consume much media themselves, and rely on a bunch of their friends to send them relevant links.
There are online tools to keep you posted about what's going on: The ones that I used most often were the NYT Skimmer, which allows you to easily skim or browse large parts of the NYT sites; TwitterTimes, a services that lays out, newspaper-style, the stories from the tweets you follow; and the newish WhileUslept, a service from Time veteran Jeff Israely, who says it is "All the news that's broken since you logged off last night."
There's Twitter itself, of course, and this December tweet by a journalist I know and respect, New York University professor Adam Penenberg, author of "Viral Loop" and a former Forbes reporter, highlights one of the useful parts of Twitter: "I read newspapers far less than I used to yet am far better informed, bounding from link to link via my Twitter feed, etc." It all depends on who you are listening to (be sure to read my column about Twiangulate).
When Joe Ricketts envisioned the creation of a daily, digital news operation that became DNAinfo, he saw the transition away from print as an opportunity to build new, trusted brands of news and information. I believe that there will be many more such projects that have the DNA, if you will, of a newspaper, but use the latest technology to find, report, aggregate stories for specific audiences.
In the meantime, I'll be a subscriber to the printed Times as long as there is such a thing.
Every Monday, DNAinfo contributing editor Sree Sreenivasan shares his observations about the changing media landscape.
