Print

The tide has turned. I have now received more Christmas “cards” through my email address than the ones I got through the postal system. I counted.

This moment was inevitable. But it is still an emotional shock nonetheless.

Many times this year, when we gathered around tables and became contemplative, my friends from the print media wondered aloud how much longer newspapers might survive the onslaught of the digital age and all the wireless delivery that implies. We were like dinosaurs observing the approach of an asteroid.

Sure, we all use laptops, Google things, send our stuff through email hours before the presses start running and carry internet-capable devices in our pockets. But that only masks the fact that, in the end, everything comes out on paper: bulky stuff delivered by hand, carried on cargo holds and completely vulnerable to rains.

Even with the best of logistics, we cannot deliver the news as fast as television and radio can. Even those traditional media require some sort of editorial processing and production. They, for their part, cannot compete with the blogs, the tweets and the texts sent out by mobile phone. The latter modes for disseminating news and opinion make each one writer, editor, publisher, printer and distributor all by his lonesome.

Without us, we like to think, there will be chaos. News will be delivered without fact-checking. Information will be relayed without editorial evaluation. Opinion will be dispensed without accountability. Horror of horrors, there will be no literary elite to uphold the rules of grammar and be exemplars of style. There will be no high priests to decide over what is important and what is not.

Then everything will be crass and shapeless, an ultra-democracy of information and opinion. But then, we might just be old-fashioned: romantic knights of a bygone age.

The great cathedrals of newspapering have been dismantled. The New York Times has sold off its presses. Great newspapers in mature societies have been bought out by tabloid tycoons. Everyone seems busy trying to figure out how to sell subscriptions digitally — although no working business model has yet been found to enable newspapers to persist in the world of wireless media.

I suppose, at some point, I might reconcile with the idea of getting my newspaper through some magical digital tablet, imagine flipping through pages on the touchscreen, and enlarging pictures to get to the detail. On that tablet, the news will be updated as I read it. Technology makes that possible. Economics makes that wise.

You may want to call me a holdout from the Age of Guttenberg.

I have so far resisted the temptation to be part of the social media world — even as I am as convinced as anyone else that, at some point, if you are not there you do not really exist. I like my newspaper fresh and crisp in the morning, with the smell of printers’ ink as distinct as possible. It goes well with strong coffee and the fragrance of tobacco.

My addiction to printers’ ink goes back four decades to that wondrous day when I watched the first edition of the high school paper I edited whisk through a simple rolling press. I remember we paid a grand sum of P280 for the entire print run. I couldn’t buy breakfast today from by favorite café with that sum. Heck, this is exactly what I have to pay for a cup of their best brew.

I remember, too, loving the aroma of molten lead when we produced The Philippine Collegian at the old letterpress of Liwayway Publishing. We did not know then how toxic this was. Most of our editorial team survived it to this day anyway — a little insane perhaps, but reasonably healthy for the sort of lifestyle we maintained since those days.

Each year, at around this time, I take out my trusty Olympia Traveller portable typewriter, clean it and ensure it is well-oiled. It has been with me for the most part of my life — although I have not written anything on it for over two decades.

The first time my sons saw this device, they did not know what it was. They wondered why I kept it so well maintained. I told them I went through death defying combat with this in hand, along with the all-steel Nikon F camera I passed on to them. That typewriter was used to cut stencils and produce mimeographed propaganda passed from hand to hand during the dark days of dictatorship.

To complete the year-end ritual, I take out my fountain pens to clean and load with ink. They are always ready to write — even if they are rarely used.

A few months ago, in Milan, I bought a nice quill: handcrafted nib and bright red plume matched with a fine ink bottle. Along with that, I bought a pencil so oversized it could be used as a baseball bat. My travelling companions wondered at the whimsical purchases I made.

Enough said: I am a straggler from the age of paper. My shelves overflow with books and there are so many stacks of paper on every corner of my home the fire department might soon classify my place a fire hazard.

Still, I know that paper-based communications will be extinct sooner than we might be ready for the eventuality. What we call the “print medium” will, however, thrive beyond ink and paper, subsist in a new world of “cloud computing” and wireless devices.

Swift as the changes wrought by the communications revolution might be, there is still need for what the print medium does best: carefully evaluated news, the well-reasoned essay, the intensively researched investigative report and the artfully laid-out page.

I raise my glass to toast colleagues who man the desks and run the presses. We are as much part of the future as we are of the past.