The Stalwart: There's Something About Print

Shockingly, my household has a subscription to the print edition of the New York Times. Not only would this seem to go against our (okay, my) cultural proclivities, as well as our (okay, my) firmly digital lifestyle, but really, print? Well, we were actually drawn in by those weekender commercials (the week, the weekend and the...).

But to be perfectly forthright, there is something about print. Watching TV on the couch while reading the paper is easier than watching TV with a laptop on my lap. Maybe it's something about not having to deal with two screens at once. Also, I notice things in the print paper that I'd never come across digitally unless I searched it out.

For example, without the print edition I would've missed this gem from erstwhile Presidential candidate and vehement foe of immigration Tom Tancredo, who contributed an op-ed piece on what he'd be talking about if he were still in the running (spoiler alert: it's immigration):

We continue to put out the welcome mat for the homegrown citizen-terrorists in Britain and other visa-waiver countries, all in the name of expedited commerce. Lenin reputedly said the capitalists would sell the rope for their own hanging. He must have had our hotel and restaurant industry in mind.

I disagree with him on his views, but good line Tom. Why didn't you whip that one out during the debates?

This is also a worthwhile read that I'd only come across when I thumb across. It's about the incidence of diabetes in Indian-dominated Jackson Heights, partly the result of the ridiculously (delicious) sugary sweets that line the main avenue:

SEVENTY-FOURTH STREET, the main drag in the South Asian section of Jackson Heights, Queens, is something of a sucrose alley. There are New Aladdin Sweets, Al-Naimat Sweets and Restaurant, and Delhi Palace Sweets, whose fogged-up window is stacked high with steaming trays of desserts.

But few of these items are selling briskly these days. At Shereen Mahal Sweets and Restaurant, for example, the rice puddings and cardamom-scented dough balls have been languishing in the display case.

“So many of my customers say, ‘Oh, we are diabetic,’ ” Tasawar Hussain, the owner, said the other day as he ladled goat stew into a takeout container. “They say: ‘Don’t give us the sugar. Do you have oil in this one?’ ”

In New York, efforts to fight Type 2 diabetes, known as adult-onset diabetes, have focused on poor, predominantly black and Hispanic neighborhoods like Mott Haven in the Bronx and Bushwick in Brooklyn. Those two communities had the city’s highest and third-highest death rates from the disease in 2004, the most recent year for which statistics were available.

But Type 2 diabetes strikes a sixth of the more than 200,000 New Yorkers whose families are from the Indian subcontinent.

I recall previously there being a NYT piece on diabetes on the actual subcontinent and what a serious problem it is (ah yes, here it is).

There's actually a lot of good stuff in the paper. Part of the lesson, I think, is that the issue of web navigability and discovery is far from solved. Somehow, I discover a lot more within the NYT when I read via paper than I do digitally. I'm probably not alone, which makes me suspect that the site could do a lot more in terms of engagement and stickiness by exploring why this is so.

Comments

It's a question of how old you are. [my] Teenagers happily sit watching TV with laptops on their laps while texting. They won't be reading print news.

Posted by: Penny Herscher | March 03, 2008 at 03:55 PM