Saturday Morning Musings - Return of Print

On the way home from lunch, I bought a copy of the Australian. I was barely a quarter of the way through before I left the bus.

Each morning I scan the news across across half a dozen outlets. I can do that in half an hour. I have decided to start buying print papers again.

At Christmas, I went book shopping as I do. My main bookshop was totally crowded. In that shopping center another bookshop has opened. At Eastgardens Pagewood a bookshop has opened. It's not very good, but it's the first for several years.

Globally and in Australia, Buzzfeed is retrenching staff.  In Northern NSW,  Fairfax Regional Media has introduced pay walls on main papers allowing you to access just three stories a month. I am not paid for my history columns, but I did have access to the e-edition of the paper. Then the paper began running my stories in the on-line edition, usually appearing well before the Wednesday Express Extra, the print version for my columns and often on the on-line front page. Then as part of the changes, I lost access to the e-edition and could not access my stories on-line

The limit is three on story access is three. I publish four and also want to check what I have published so I am rather stuffed. I complained to my editor, but there appears to be nothing he can do. He cannot even give me personal on-line access even though a subscription was part of the original deal. He also said that out-of -towners who wanted to read the columns would be okay because they could access three columns without charge.

This view suffers from two problems. Out-of-towners like to read more than three stories when they visit and, in any case, they can't read all my stories because there are more than three in a month. So I can't really promote the columns in the paper. That has to wait until they are on-line on my history blog.

Perhaps the most important problem in all this is the Fairfax pay rule has turned much of Northern NSW, my broader New England, into a news' black-hole so far as those living outside New England are concerned. Note that the News' papers brought from APN also have pay walls.We have an entire area of Australia that has largely become a news black-hole not just for those living outside the area but also for those within who live outside or are interested in more than their immediate area. And that's most.

I will return to this issue later. For the moment, I want to come back to my headline.

The question of on-line v print is not an either or, but one of balance and promotion. In this mix, print is coming back. let me give an example. D E Stevenson's books appeal to a niche. When we just had print, they dropped out of publication. Now, most are back in e-editions that can justify small runs. But as e-publishing has grown, so has print publishing for those who like the physical product. The totality of e and print means that almost all of her books are, once again, available to readers.