Long live the newspaper in a digital age

Opinion / Liang Hongfu

 Long live the newspaper in a digital age
By Liang Hongfu (China Daily)
Updated: 2006-02-07 06:26

My daughter says I am uncool because I read the newspaper everyday. And
she is not the only one telling me that newspapers have gone out of
fashion.

Many technology gurus have long predicted the demise of not just
newspapers but print media as a whole. When you can get the news on the
Internet free anytime you want, they ask, why bother buying a newspaper?

Because there is magic in paper and ink.

Reading a newspaper at breakfast has been one of the few consistent
things people can cherish in life.

Remember the delight of reading your favourite columnist poking fun at
the omnipotent establishments that you and your cronies love to despise?
Or the outrage you felt on reading an expose of gouging by the property
oligarchy (nothing new in this), which was largely responsible for
plunging you so deeply in debt?

Calm down and take a sip of coffee before turning to the gossip column,
which you never admit that you have ever read.

Oh yes, you are just as nosey as any other man, and you know that every
bit of juicy detail in that column will be thoroughly dissected and
analyzed by your colleagues at lunch in the office canteen that afternoon.

Time to leave home and you are still only halfway through an in-depth
analysis on the global interest rate trend that could have a major impact
on the value of your stock holdings. Don't worry. Just fold the paper and
carry it in your briefcase or your back pocket (a common practice among
Hong Kong men) for reading on the train to work.

Let our technophile friends get connected with hideous looking headphones
on their heads, miles of wire around their bodies and weighty PDAs or
MP3s in their pockets. If they dig the Frankenstein look, they are free
to wear the appropriate accessories. For me, I think such outfit is more
suitable for Halloween than a daily commute.

At the end of the day, it's the content that matters. And content is all
about detail.

You can get all the news you want from radio, television or the Internet.
In fact, you can get inundated by news with the proliferation of 24-hour
news stations in major cities around the world. But all they can offer
are the bare facts accompanied, in the case of television, by pictures
and graphics.

A television news producer friend once told me that the average
television viewer's attention span was expressed in terms of seconds. It
takes about as long to digest the lead TV story as it does to read a
brief story in a newspaper. There is simply no room for detail in a story
that short.

The Internet has its limitations too. I read several foreign newspapers
on the Internet everyday for work. But I don't enjoy it. I find the
experience of reading a newspaper on the computer monitor as appealing as
drinking warm beer in an over-heated Beijing restaurant.

An acquaintance of mine in Hong Kong is very proud that he has all the
latest news beeped to his PDA. I told him there was nothing cool about
being one of the first people in the world to learn about a fire in
Northpoint or a traffic accident in Aberdeen. He never called me again.
Technophiles are very protective of their gear.

But our newspaper loyalists love our form of news too. It is common to
find Shanghai men trying to read newspapers in extremely crowded subway
cars where commuters are packed so tightly together that makes normal
breathing a chore.

I once rode a taxi whose driver had a newspaper spread on the steering
wheel while crawling through traffic on a busy Shanghai road.

Long live the newspaper.

Email: jamesleung@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 02/07/2006 page4)

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