I’ve been meaning to comment on this for a while since we started our home delivery subscription to The New York Times at the beginning of the month. In reading the paper in its original ink and newsprint version, I’ve come across articles and read that I never would have with the on-line version. The on-line version is more suitable if you know what you are after and then go directly to it. Or if you are are a sports fan, like me, you go to the sport index and browse the headlines and pix. But it is not the same with the newsprint version. The full articles are there in plain view and attracts the eye and mind. You don’t have to read them all, but you have more text and treatment available on which to judge whether to continue reading. Also I find the longer articles far easier to read in the paper version than on-line. I find them tedious, and somewhat imposing to tackle on-line. Anyone reading articles in the Times magazine knows what I mean.

Today’s edition is a case in point. The front page has an article on the analysis of what went wrong with the blowout prevention on the Deepwater Horizon. It’s a two-column story above the fold and is continued on two full pages and a half of another inside. I mean it is an in-depth, long story with colored graphics of the five-story blowout preventer and graphics and diagrams of the mechanisms designed to trigger the blind shear ram. I would find it near impossible to get the same comprehension of this story if I read it only on-line. And as I thumbed through the rest of the front page section I came across a story of the Cap d’Or, a 110 year-old tavern in Alexandria, Egypt. Alexandria a city built by Alexander the Great and with a multinational citizenry… once.

What is our citizenry going to look like, I wonder, if all we read are short simplistic articles and are isolated… cocooned… from the unfamiliar?