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)