Thanks for starting this one off, Terry!

http://archives.cbc.ca/arts_entertainment/media/clips/342-1818/

For those of you who would rather read than watch:

McLuhan says television is a cool or low definition medium, offering little information but the user participates with most of his senses.

He explains that a book is a hot or high definition medium, presenting the user with lots of information at a level of lower sensory participation.

I mention this for two reasons. First, I find that I really enjoy getting the LJ in my hands every Thursday — there is something about turning the pages, seeing what kinds of surprises are there, who I know on the Police Blotter, etc., that seeing the RSS feed or TCEXTRA simply cannot replace. I have to say that I am really involved in the paper when I get it in a way that I am never involved in on-line news sources — which also have an “edited for the web” quality about them that print doesn’t.

Here’s number 2: Does “being in print” make a difference? There is absolutely no doubt in my mind, and I offer two bits of evidence. (1) Last summer, the LJ printed some stories about the summer soccer program Trinity Lime Rock runs — and our attendance more than doubled over the previous summer. (2) The week preceding Holy Week this year, due to a production error, Trinity’s ad for Holy Week services didn’t run. We had dynamite music that week — the complete Byrd’s 1610 “Saint John’s Passion” and parts of Bach’s B-Minor Mass, both with hired soloists supplementing our already-respectable choir — and, without print advertising, attendance was embarrassingly small for the Maundy Thursday and Good Friday services at which they were performed.

Is the web a substitute for print? Not around here, anyway. Trinity’s website (www.trinitylimerock.org) gets respect on a national level, and logs between 50 - 100 visitors a day (considerably more some times of year)(tracked via Google Analytics). We’re even visited by people who Googled the names of other local churches that don’t have websites and found ours instead! (The visitor numbers for the website are in addition to visitors to our Vicar’s blog: trinitylimerock.blogspot.com.)

Virtually every person who sets foot in our little church mentions the website and the weblog. But the on-line visibility clearly didn’t suffice when the print ad didn’t run.

Now, that is a long way of saying I think that regardless of what MacLuhan said, print — at least local print — is “hot” media and the web is “cool” media. Considering that Trinity’s demographic is younger than most other churches in this area, and thus is presumably more oriented toward electronic communications, I’d say that the LJ has a secure place around here for the foreseeable future!

I very much share your concerns. My hope is that when newspapers abandon print, then their production and distribution costs will decline to the point that they can still afford strong news staffs.

As for why the LJ swims against the “width tide,” it’s always been my understanding that our board of directors likes the quirky but expansive girth and that with our small economy of scale, only tiny savings could be realized by slimming down anyway.

It does make our papers stand out on the shelves, doesn’t it?

I grew up in a household where we got the Des Moines Tribune every day. (That was the edition of the Register that was sent by mail to out of town subscribers.) We also had three newspapers from the three county seats in our area for our best local news. My hometown had a weekly.

This was in the 40s and 50s long before the internet. However, it is interesting to know that all of these papers are still being published.

But I still ahve subscriptions to both the Waterbury Republican and the Lakeville Journal.

I guess I still need the reassurance of the paper in my hands at least once a day, and its great to have the Journal to thumb thru for a week….

Bye the way…how much energy is wasted with the 300+ news channels…probably more than what it takes to produce papers!

I think Terry makes a good point that the small-town weekly will most likely never die for the obvious reasons, but the future looks far more bleak for the larger-scale print newspapers. How can a once- or twice-daily print edition compete with a constantly-updated CNN.com or WSJ.com? More ironically, to what extent is the print New York Times cannabalized by its internet version?

I find the comparison with e-books inapt. The experience of reading a book, and the motivations and fulfillments therein, are radically different than those of the news-seeker, to whom timing, accuracy and immediate relevance are everything.