Do Print Authors Hide Behind Their Medium?

There’s one thing that I find a little odd about writing a column for a print magazine, and that’s the lack of feedback.

In web publishing, there are so many metrics that are instantly available for you to gauge whether something is successful or not—number of comments on the post, number of visits to the page, number of times your post has been voted for on a social media site like digg, delicious, reddit … Within 24 hours, you know whether something you’ve published on the web is something that has resonated with others, or flunked.

Even more than that, you can determine what country the people who read your article came from, what operating system and browser they were using when they did so, and how fast their internet connection was. You can see where they went after your post, and which pages they were reading beforehand. Sometimes it almost feels like you know them.

In print, you don’t get any of that. You might get the occasional person who writes in to the magazine with feedback, that the editor may or may not pass on. Or occasionally someone will write a blog post along the lines of “I was reading an article in this magazine the other day which got me thinking …”

But mostly, you just get silence. Whilst the crickets chirp, people may be either loving your writing, or hating it, or worse, feeling nothing. But as an author in a print magazine or newspaper, you wouldn’t really know.

I wonder how much that enables print-based journalists to hide, how much mediocrity is masked by a medium that is one-way.

I really enjoy writing my monthly web column for Desktop magazine, partly because it’s nice seeing one’s words shine on glossy, colour paper.

But print journalism is dead.

posted: 28.03. 2009, 22:00 (1)