Digitizing a lifelong habit is a double-mouthful proposition and a heckuva challenge, especially for us older folks. After all, fetching the newspaper from the driveway and then reading it at a leisurely pace, with a cup of coffee in hand, is a rite of daily passage.
In our home, it’s each day’s beginning, the engine of informed discourse, spousal discussions and spirited household debates.
Now we senior newspaper readers are swallowing hard and hesitantly trying the digital versions of pages we can’t hold in our hands. The process is an upset of civilized routines, and gosh, you must make sure your smartphone or computer is well-charged, and the screen set with proper resolution.
A computerized coffeemaker is one thing — a digital newspaper is quite another, a giant leap of forced adjustments for some of us.
This was well predicted.
The out-of-towner introduced to us eagerly learning young journalists in 1966 was a “futurist.” (I remember that word, I do not recall his name.) His point was that there would be a steady transformation in how news would be packaged, processed and delivered. His emphasis was on screens. One day, he said, Americans would awake each morning with their news packaged according to their interests on television-like screens.
He didn’t mention smartphones or computers. And his youthful audience that day was unimpressed. That future, if it existed at all, seemed well beyond current horizons of possibilities.
But with pounding steps of “progress,” the reality of “screens” has overtaken information sharing.
On a recent Sunday, my wife and I decided to take the leap. We would put the hard-copy newspaper aside and read the e-paper, front to back, online, digitally and on a screen format.
Would this be the beginning of a new morning ritual?
The digital edition is formatted to look like a print newspaper. The usual news, sports, obituaries, business stories and opinions pages are the same, but the digital format is a “fatter” newspaper with more content. Ads seem more vivid. The interactive puzzles work surprisingly well for the cruciverbalists among us. But not needing a pencil is another troubling disconnect from our lovable newspaper routines.
My older tablet functioned nicely, and with a bit of practice, navigation could become intuitive. And the unease and anxiety might abate, too.
A friend described the experience of reading the newspaper in its online format this way: “It just doesn’t seem right — yet. I’ll check in online to see what’s going on, but I still need my paper in my hands to start the day, every day.”
Such comments bring the discussion to a generational divide framing these trends.
Younger folks sense little “need” for a newspaper in their hands. They generally prefer online services; their news flows along with their daily habits of information gathering and social media activities. For many, this includes cups of coffee in well-digitized coffee shops.
But many of us older readers, having achieved basic internet navigation skills, want it both ways: fast online news options and that bundle of newsprint we like to hold in our hands. Formatting digital editions to look like the print versions is a nice gesture to older readers, and bless this and all other newspapers that provide this option.
But there’s a bottom line to this reckoning trend, and we hard-copy newspaper lovers should understand it, pronto. The suffix “paper” is separating itself from the product we have known for generations. That “screen” future described by the futurist in 1966 has become a reality on steroids. Heck, there might be something even more radical just ahead.
But one reality stands firmly and objectively against the dramatic trends of information delivery: News has never been more important to us Americans, and its distribution has never been more diverse. Any community with a sound daily newspaper has a sound source for news and opinion. And the number of such communities is dwindling steadily.
Regional Charleston, we should be thankful, is not on that list. And we can applaud our newspaper for providing us the advantages of technology and digital formatting — and for growing coverage about local issues in Columbia, Greenville and the Myrtle Beach area.
So, what do we call a “newspaper” when it is no longer delivered on paper?
“News,” I reckon, and its content and delivery modes will still be vitally important to our community.
Ron Brinson is a former associate editor of this newspaper. He can be reached at rbrin1013@gmail.com
