FEATURE
Mighty Print
BY LAUREL BRUNNER , VERDIGRIS PROJECT
There ’ s been heightened interest of late in the effectiveness of the printed word . It started with direct mail associations finding higher response rates to print than to electronic equivalents . Printed book sales in developed markets are outpacing e-book sales . And even the newspaper industry is still seeing 60 % of revenues coming from print . According to Michael Golden , vice-chairman of the New York Times , who spoke at the recent Wan-Ifra World Publishing Expo , ' readers have stayed with print and they are paying an increasing price for it '.
This is unsurprising for a couple of very basic reasons . As well as the content it carries , print is perceived as the product and we like to buy stuff . Print satisfi es our urge for things we can actually hold in our hands . We appreciate print ’ s physicality , its tangibility and its convenience . That printed paper is also recyclable because it is based on renewable resources is an added bonus that can soothe our troubled eco-consciences .
These are all well rehearsed and compelling arguments for print , made since the emergence of electronic media in the last century . And it was always the case that as the novelty of electronic media wears off , people could choose to return to print . The question is , are they returning in sufficient numbers to sustain modern publishing business models ?
In this ever more splintered communications environment , it might be that electronic media may actually be starting to drive consumers back to print . Increasing numbers of people choose to trust an editor or publisher to curate their content for them . Many of us prefer to look at a row of books on the shelf ( or piles on the floor ), instead of admiring a lone electronic device . Even when attractively accessorised with a dangling power supply and the tease of a flashing LED , the joyless aesthetics of an e-book simply don ’ t cut it .
Consumers , especially of newspapers , prefer to trust a brand rather than rely on a platform with no commitment to content integrity whatsoever , and commercial motives based on traffic and not probity . The whole fake news discussion overlooks the fact that information is a tool wielded to support a specified objective no matter how morally suspect . Social media platforms want to drive engagement and interaction in order to deliver audience numbers for advertising and nothing more . They claim a social purpose , but the real purpose is commercial and their users are unwitting raw material for a highly profitable business model . Social media platforms are not in the business of driving fact based debate or encouraging information that supports the public interest . They are in the ad sales business .
That people embrace fake news at all should remind us that in the words of Arthur Hays Sulzberfer , a former publisher of the New York Times , that ' along with responsible newspapers , we must have responsible readers '. Print readers can take comfort in the fact that they not only have a better chance of being able to trust a more expensive and substantial medium , but they can also trust that the medium itself is recyclable .
The Verdigris Project is supported by Agfa Graphics ( www . agfa . com ), EFI ( www . efi . com ), Epson ( www . epson . com ), FESPA ( www . fespa . com ), HP ( www . hp . com / Environment ), Kodak ( www . kodak . com / go / sustainability ), Kornit ( www . kornit . com ), Practical Publishing ( www . practicalpublishing . co . za ), Ricoh ( www . ricoh . com ), Spindrift ( http :// spindrift . click /), Splash PR ( www . splashpr . co . uk ), Unity Publishing ( http :// unity-publishing . co . uk ) and Xeikon ( www . xeikon . com ).
This work by the Verdigris Project is licenced under a Creative Commons attribution-noderivs 3.0 Unported licence http :// creativecommons . org / licences / by-nd / 3.0 /
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Laurel Brunner ,
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Managing Director Digital Dots Limited , www . digitaldots . org , www . verdigrisproject . com
PG 32 JANUARY 2018 AFRICA PRINT JOURNAL www . AfricaPrint . com