Thanks, but I'll stay on the stagecoach

My fiancé and I recently moved from St. Paul to the Los Angeles area for her job. We had a leisurely drive across the country, stopping to hike in the Grand Canyon, but still somehow managed to arrive a full week before our moving truck. That meant camping out in our own apartment with an air mattress and paper plates. Well, at least we'd brought out laptops along in the car, so we'd have internet access, right? Wrong-Verizon fumbled the order and it would be a week before they could have a guy come out to hook up the DSL. And when our things did arrive the television was useless; because our apartment faces the ocean, the aerial would only pick up one station, and only when I held it out the window. The cable company promptly arrived on the scene-and found that their cable outlet had been pulled out during a recent remodel.

This technological nightmare persisted for several weeks, during which we would have been cut off almost entirely from the outside world, except for one thing. The day we arrived I called the Los Angeles Times. It took about three minutes over the phone to start a subscription, and the next day, the very next day, as if by magic, there was a newspaper outside our apartment door.

The only thing we could pick up in our apartment were our cell phones and a static-filled public radio station, but we had the L.A. Times.
My fiancé, who likes to get her news from the Today show as she dresses, instead listened to me reading stories from the Times (I tried to talk like Matt Lauer, but was not quite convincing). As for me, I'd always gotten my news from a newspaper, and even now that our apartment is a wireless haven where the Today show airs every morning at 7am, I still read the Times.

How much longer will I and other eccentrics be allowed the luxury of perusing a printed newspaper? Precious little time, according to most technology gurus. They began predicting doom for the print newspaper in the early ‘90s, with the advent of the internet era. Editor Mark Karlin, for example, in an article on Buzzflash.com, calls newspapers "economically as obsolete as stage coaches..." The reason? "Quite simply, the economic costs of news print, production and distribution of a hand-held paper are unsustainable in an age of instant digital transmission of information..." Yet I remember tech gurus in 1995 predicting the death of the newspaper in the next five years, and here we are, nearly fifteen years later, with every major city having at least one daily print paper. The modern newspapers that we read today are essentially an 18th century invention, and their death has been hailed many times before-with the advent of the telegraph, the radio, the television. Each of these new news mediums cut into newspaper readership, yet they remain a major player in news gathering and reporting.

Why is this "stagecoach" still running? An information medium becomes obsolete when a newer medium comes along that can do everything it can do but better, cheaper, or with more functionality. The radio, for example, could do everything the telegraph did and more, and so the telegraph is obsolete. Residential land phones are becoming a thing of the past, because cell phones can do everything they can do, plus you can take them with you. But when we consider the medium of the newspaper, we find that there are many things it can do that radio and television cannot. It can carry a hundred stories, rather than seven or eight, and you only have to read the ones you are interested in. You can read the paper whenever you want, and you can ignore the advertisements. You can read as fast as you want, and read something over again. Television and radio can add dimensions of sight and sound to the news, but they can't replicate the newspaper. The only thing that comes close-that could, indeed, make the print newspaper obsolete-are the web editions of the newspapers themselves. Even here, however, there are aspects of the print newspaper has which cannot be replicated. It does not require power. It does not require internet access. It can go anywhere and is not as heavy as a laptop. It is tactile and can be navigated with the hands, rather than a mouse. You can clip coupons from it or cartoons to hang on the refrigerator. And on and on...

The economics Karlin mentions may indeed reshape the print newspaper, but as long as there are enough subscribers willing to pay for the extra cost of print, it will probably soldier on. Call me hidebound, but I'm willing to bet in twenty years most major metropolitan areas in the United States will still have a print newspaper, even if it is a weekly digest mailed out to a few thousand. In fact, just to be contrary, let me predict that, as more and more Americans work on the computer at their jobs, their joy in sitting over a computer or a Kindle or some other device that imitates paper when they get home will wane, and the sheer archaic simplicity of a quiet half hour over the printed page will beckon. Who knows, reading newspapers by candlelight could become the new fad. Speaking of candles-still around, aren't they?