Larry D. Lauer

Some media experts argue that print cannot survive the digital revolution. They point out that books are too cumbersome and print in general is not efficient enough. They argue that new media does everything print can do, and with much more speed and efficiency. Why would anyone want to take the time to produce clumsy printed materials?

There are several reasons to challenge this argument:

1. In the entire history of communication no medium has ever gone completely away.

2. When a new medium becomes dominant, the other media platforms just change roles.

3. These new roles usually are based on their inherent strengths. And print has at least two inherent strengths.

First, print is effective for delivering clarity, structure, logic and brevity. These characteristics have already influenced the development of a concise and structured writing style for maximum effectiveness on the Internet.

Second, printed materials can be held in your hand and can function as a tangible and lasting symbol of a program or institution. Brochures, pamphlets, flyers, etc. will therefore continue to occupy an important place in the total mix of media options. When used properly they “physically” display an institution’s differentiating identity and competitive advantage. They have a long “shelf life” and reinforce credibility through their permanence.

The tangible and more permanent nature of print encourages day-to-day journalists to find time to write books. Even reporters who write for digital media outlets write printed books in order to advance their visibility and reputation. The permanent nature of printed books establishes authors as experts.

In fact, many people who abandoned books are reconsidering their decision. They have rediscovered that curling up in the corner with a “real” book allows them to escape into a private world of their own. Somehow new media experiences are not quite the same. This is especially true for lovers of fiction and poetry.

For readers of nonfiction a printed book can seem easier to work through, to underline, and to flip pages back and forth in order to reread portions. Admittedly all of this is possible with e-books. Even so, many readers have found e-books to be more cumbersome.

Increasing numbers of readers are also admitting they download the electronic version and if they like it they also buy the real book. If true, this is unanticipated good news for the publishing industry!

So is print going away? I think not. Rather it will be fine-tuned around its strengths and become a more precisely defined tool in an ever-expanding media toolbox.

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This is a question I have often asked my book editors over the years.  Did your changes make my work better, or just different? Just different is always upsetting. Now I find myself asking the same question about changes in the way most of us receive information about the day’s events.

For example, when I follow my favorite reporters on Twitter I am getting observations about a variety of events all day long. But I also can go to the electronic or print version of their news publication or website, find their columns, and scan their best material. Granted, there might be a few more details embedded in their countless tweets, but at the end of the day did I really get more and better information? In other words, was “following” them  better, or just different?

Back in the day of the newspaper, if you had access to both a morning and evening newspaper, listened to a wrap-up on the radio in the car, and then watched the day’s summary on television, you could ask the same questions. Was it better? Or was it just different?

Conventional wisdom suggested that the digital world would provide information faster and more efficiently. And potentially it certainly can. But if you spend all day watching CNN; or tweeting, retweeting and following others on Twitter; or interacting with multiple followers on other digital media platforms; are you getting better informed, or are your methods just different?

I am convinced that somewhere in this deluge of media options there is a combination that can result in time saved and better information. But I am also convinced that few of us are managing our media engagement well enough for this to actually happen. In fact, I am betting that most of us are wasting too much time following too many people and organizations on too many media platforms. And then most of us proceed to make matters worse by choosing outlets that only reinforce our biases!

So when all is said and done, how are we really doing so far? Are we better informed… or is the digital world just different?

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The 24/7 news channels fill all day every day with reports written to compel us to stay tuned.  “Breaking news” has become the most used phrase. And digital technology has enabled this kind of immediate, intense and ongoing coverage of crises and disasters from school shootings and devastating storms to riots in the streets and airplane crashes. This week we have still another airplane crash in Asia, and so here we go again.

In such situations there are four basic “news” questions:  (1) What happened?  (2) Who was effected?  (3) What is being done?  (4) And what did we learn? When those questions are answered, why would coverage continue? Are periodic updates not sufficient?

Over zealous continuous news reporting almost always needs to be corrected. Corrections that follow much later get lost in the clutter. In the case of hurricane Katrina early information was full of errors, and later corrections made little difference. Continuous coverage of the Malaysian airplane disaster yielded little if any useful information. When the issue behind recent street riots in the U.S. became clear, what value was continuous live coverage? At what point do television news people become more influencers than reporters?

So what can we expect to learn from non-stop coverage of this most recent air disaster that we would not learn from periodic updates? Or to put it another way: When does news coverage become reality TV? And how do we tell the difference?

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“I would have written a shorter letter but I did not have the time.”  This is an often quoted phrase that contains a large measure of truth. Both research and experience strongly suggest that successful communication requires that complex issues be reduced to only a few major points. And this takes deep thought and great care to accomplish.

But this insight coincides with the latest internet rage… the concept of “big data.” Today’s technology enables the processing of volumes of data more rapidly and efficiently than ever before. This big data, it is argued, will enable more efficient problem-solving than ever before. Some see it as the breakthrough that can revolutionize our understanding of most everything.

It certainly is a wonderful breakthrough for marketers who want to know more about us. And it can load communicators with a depth of information they never before had. But the challenge will be to reduce that big data to understandable simple language. Otherwise this deluge of data and metrics will prove counterproductive to understanding.

Many of us have been through complex strategic and communication planning exercises where countless people spent countless hours making plans detailing objectives, tactics, and who does what by when. But such plans ended up on shelves because the press of daily events required a more simple and practical approach. The more data we had to deal with, the less likely those plans would get implemented.

More than ever, in these big data times we need to take the time and care to write those shorter letters, make more simple plans, and use more carefully crafted and simple message points.

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Much of what is reported about the world today is influenced, and many times actually shaped, by the compelling appeal of cameras and images. And more and more people every day get all of their news from the Internet, which is loaded with dramatic and abbreviated visual accounts of complex events.

Even the “look” of newspapers has changed because of the compelling power of television and other visual imagery. Large dramatic pictures and links to fast-paced video clips are appearing on or near front pages. And this has led to abbreviated and more dramatic styles of writing.

But when news is driven so consistently by imagery, how much can come through as straight reporting? Stop and think about it. When a camera frames a scene, nothing outside that frame exists to the audience. Close-ups direct attention to what the producer/reporter wants audiences to see, not what they might look around and see if they were there. Editing adds drama. Cameras follow or “track” events as they unfold,  adding more drama. And creating “montages” out of selected separate images produces a truly unique, “cinema only” reality.

Films and videos always give people the feeling that they “saw it with their own eyes,” and therefore it must be true. But a small riot often looks like an entire city is coming apart. And neighborhood  disturbances can look like an entire country is in revolt. News events become a producer’s  cinematic version of the situation, and often will not convey events as their audiences would see them. It is not uncommon for people to report that a video story they saw about an event they actually attended did not accurately depict that event at all!

Endless daily dramatic imagery edited to compete for attention can lead to confusion and even misunderstanding. Thus, in today’s digital world people must first become their own editors, and then take all these cinematic influences into account as they strive to understand what’s really going on.

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