in modern journalism: Relevant or outdated?

In the modern digital age, shelves have begun to empty of print magazines. Staying informed has become yet another screenbased activity — scrolling through the same filter-bubble headlines, dodging bright advertisements and other distractions that vie for your attention.

With access to thousands of stories at our fingertips, it’s hard to imagine the world of journalism without online newspapers and digital catalogs. But print magazines, once a staple, still add elements to journalism that can’t be found on digital platforms. Now more than ever, we need this form of journalism to continue — but now more than ever, it’s at risk of ending altogether.

Print magazines date back to the 17th century, though they only became truly mass consumed in the U.S. in 1893 when several popular magazines lowered their prices. The shift made the once-expensive media form accessible to the general public. The wider audience yielded higher advertising profits, which in turn allowed magazines to sell even for less than their cost of production.

Accessibility was everywhere: Print journalism found a vast audience by offering content related to the interests and problems of the print media has waned significantly. In 2022 alone, several popular news outlets announced they’d be cutting their print magazines, including industry giants like The Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly and Allure. The end of print journalism for several outlets has meant layoffs for print staff, most of whom had been reporting for their publication for years, becoming experts in their assigned beats.

The decision to cut print magazines and end subscriptions is partly the result of an unprecedented rise in not just casual readers, but in paid online subscribers. Digital content allows newsrooms to reach more readers faster. In sidestepping print distribution, online journalism provides flexibility when scaling to larger and larger audiences. Media are banking on new digital formats to fill the gap, and new ways to make the most of available audiences and compete for advertising.

While digital platforms do hold the advantage of efficiency, print magazines often result in more retention than screens. The simplicity of paper allows for clarity when reading, according to Scientific American, as digital devices make it more difficult to navigate longer texts and may inhibit comprehension. Lower retention translates to confused readers and a less enjoyable experience.

David Leonhardt, a senior writer for The New York Times, has experience writing for both the print and online versions of The Times after working at the organization for over 20 years. For him, the difference in the reader experience between print and online is signif

“I think one of the big dan gers of modern digital life is dis traction,” Leonhardt said. “A print newspaper never runs out of battery. It never has any notifications. You can always read it even if you’re in a tunnel or on a subway, and that’s actually something quite wonderful.”

When editing, news outlets must factor in the guarantee of digital dis tractions, including ads that pop up throughout and in front of their stories. Editors adjust to be even more concise than they already were, involuntarily lessening the value of longer, more analytical stories. A study conducted by Slate found that only about half the readers who choose to read a given story online make it more than halfway through. That reality makes it into the pitch meetings.

According to informatics professor Dr. Gloria Mark of the University of California, Irvine, in 2004, the average attention span was two and a half minutes; in 2023, it’s about 47 seconds. Print magazines are distinct from online ones in that they allow the reader to truly pace themselves to take in what the story is conveying. For Jessica Goldstein, a contributing editor to The Washingtonian and former writer for the Washington Post Magazine, print magazines afford readers a private break from the demands of a fast-paced life.

“There’s more of a hunger for experiences that aren’t mediated by big tech, that they’re not automatically public or being tracked,” Goldstein said.

When it comes to the creative aspects of stories, print magazines also have an edge of flexibility and potential for unique artistic choices with each edition. Online user interfaces follow a consistent format by design, and copy editors publishing online must make safe and consistent choices with graphics, writing styles and conventions to ensure the reader experience is seamless with respect to other arti- presence. In the last six years, the Post has run on an internally-built publishing suite of software called Arc XP that the publication has also annexed to sell to other media.

Courtney Rukan, the Post’s deputy multiplatform editing chief, observed this evolution firsthand. Rukan began to work for the organization in 1998 and watched it go through several publishing systems, each one integrating itself more and more into the online experience. Adapting to the digital age requires new considerations for the formatting of tangential story elements like photos and captions, he said. Editors must now consider how, where and when those elements should appear on a personal device.

When writing for print, a journalist is writing to a defined spec — the considerations are much different online, Rukan said, as captions can interrupt the flow of the story in terms of user experience. Additionally, journalists have to refine their stories to get as much hit-count traction as possible.

“We have to remember, we’re writing not only for readers, but also for the search engine algorithms,” Rukan said. “We can use those parameters to get our stories to more readers, so we really have to think about how to present the story.”

As technology advances, algorithms are becoming an increasingly important part in nearly all sectors, including journalism where they are used to aggregate user-specific content streams. Algorithms purport to expose readers to relevant articles, though for organizations to take full advantage of them, journalists must adapt their writing and be more concise, and more targeted in order to trigger recognition in the programs and continued interest among the readers.

Print publications don’t face such creative limitations. The artistic components of each mag azine add more to the experience than they do online, and the lack of constraints allows each edition to present a truly unique, but still cohe sive image.

The nightmare of disinformation and misinformation campaigns in the last decade also eases with print media — a considerably more labor-intensive medium, and one that necessarily must be more close ly managed. A series of increasingly height ened vetting awaits every story before it’s pressed into thousands of copies and shipped across the country. Editors cannot afford mis takes, and the expertise fans out, on display at every full newsstand — Runner’s World to Guitar World.

Accurate or not, online media allows the reader to easily access vast amounts of infor mation — though it can become somewhat overwhelming for the reader, Leon hardt said. For him, the word constraints of print create a unique challenge for journalists and are more substantive aims than algorithm-targeted edits.

“One of the wonderful things about print is it forces discipline in a way that online does not,” Leonhardt said. “Print forces you to say, ‘What are the 800 or 1000 words that summarize this better than anything else?’”

Users are still the ones directing the industry, according to Goldstein, and have the ability to demand the kind of positive media experiences once more common.

“I feel like people understand that there’s something really crucial about having some offline reading experience,” Goldstein said. “I think that people are seeking that.”