An Argument for Print

I read an article in the May 2007 issue of Harper’s Magazine about a couple who are both intimately involved with digital content. Rick “moonlights—in his day job—as board president of the Internet Archive, a Web clearinghouse for free, public-domain information,” while Megan “is on the editorial board of a magazine called Bad Subjects, which provides fifteen years of back content for free online.”

The article isn’t about how they are a Net-savvy couple who take advantage of all this digital life has to offer. It’s about their hobby, a personal library of over 50,000 items (books, pamphlets, “ephemera”) that they have organized by how the subjects relate to each other in their own minds. To them, and to me, the beauty and usefulness of this library is a great example of why print is absolutely necessary to the industries it serves in B2B media.

When readers search the Internet, they go to Google, or a specific Web site that they are already aware of to find what they need. The notion of “surfing” the Net is outdated: exploration rarely happens online anymore, especially for business.

This is one of the things magazines are good for. You trust the editors at a publication to aggregate a host of related information for you, and then you open up that aggregation and flip through it, looking to find whatever it is you might find. (And then, when you get there, taking a good, long look…but that’s another issue.)

Being able to find the solutions to business problems quickly and real-time, actionable information has done wonders for our productivity—the Internet is one of the greatest business tools ever invented. But that doesn’t mean that exploration and deep-diving aren’t as absolutely essential as they used to be—and that’s print’s job.