Forward with print

I was shocked to realize, fairly recently, that the college I’m running in Tagaytay did not have subscriptions to any of our newspapers.

One of the faculty explained that there were subscriptions to major papers before the pandemic, but then deliveries stopped and no one bothered renewing even after deliveries were again available. Besides, the faculty explained, papers were online anyway.

I did know we had a subscription to Press Reader, an online service that provides, on a daily basis, hundreds of newspapers and magazines, local and international. But I also knew only a handful of students and faculty, and only occasionally, used that valuable resource.

(Over at UP Diliman, where I continue to teach and where Press Reader is also available, every semester I have to remind our students about the service, with most of them not even knowing that UP provides this to them for free.)

I fear that the “it’s online anyway” excuse not to get print media is not just a threat to journalism, but also leads to a further deterioration of our functional literacy.

When you read print, you find yourself reflecting, even going back to an earlier paragraph or sentence to make sense of the entire article. That is much less likely to happen with online “reading.”

I do rely on online subscriptions for many of the world’s great newspapers like The Guardian and New York Times, as well as academic journals, but still find myself wishing I had the print versions, which you can clip and store and review later on. It’s not just words, but photographs that touch the mind and the heart.

For a growing number of people, including our younger generations, online reading of newspapers is sporadic, often to just look up news about some celebrity, the latest fashion, or new models of gadgets.

Add on the competition with social media and the way the internet drives consumers, based on your previous searches and “reading,” into sites that express the same tastes and opinions as you have, and you end up in echo chambers, being told what you want to hear, often fake news and conspiracy theories and plain gossip.

It’s not just the reflective process that makes print media so important. With important issues, I can go back to the previous days’ papers to piece together the details. This process trains the mind, so if you want to really dig up a story, say from five years ago, I find I can quickly choose keywords that revive the earlier accounts I read at the time. The result is faster and more efficient retrieval, even with this aging brain of mine.

I grew up with many newspapers at home and my father, in his retirement days and lots of free time, got eight daily newspapers—three in English and five in Chinese. The Chinese papers were all locally produced, reflecting different alignments—mainland China and Taiwan.

His friends loved to call him for the latest scoops and political analysis, We were popular, too, with the dyaryo’t bote (itinerant collectors of old newspapers and bottles) and friends with lots of dogs and cats and pee and poo.

Print media offers so much stuff you miss online. I would never buy something solely based on an ad on the internet, with all its scams. Newspaper ads and announcements are somewhat more reliable.

I should mention, too, Inquirer Research’s “This Week’s Milestones” and “This Week’s Festivals,” which you won’t think of looking up if you rely on online newspapers. Last Sunday, it appeared together with an article on the woodcarvers of Betis, again something you’re not likely to look up online.

When I told an octogenarian friend about the joys of print newspapers, she asked for the contact information of my delivery person. She now gets five of the dailies.

Follow the lead of senior citizens and move forward with print, with the times.

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There’s a forum tomorrow, Wednesday, 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. on “Spirituality in Philippine Mental Health Research and Practice,” a nonsectarian overview of what’s being done to include spirituality together with the biological, psychological, and social aspects of health care in medical care and research. Admission is free. For more information, visit: bit.ly/SpiritualityInMH2022

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mtan@inquirer.com.ph