With the approach of the gala benefit celebrating the 175th anniversary of Harper’s Magazine, I’m frequently asked why we remain so faithful to print. Isn’t it time to get with the program and accept digital reality? Shouldn’t we give up the ghost, not to mention the vicissitudes of the international paper market, lately worsened by Trump’s tariffs?
“Digital, digital, and more digital,” a friendly book publisher advised me more than 20 years ago, and the chorus promoting pixelated perception has only gotten louder. (I was also repeatedly told, “Information wants to be free,” but that refrain has died down as more and more media organizations have followed my lead and realized the necessity of paywalls.)
My commitment to print is not romantic posturing. A robust and growing body of social-science research has shown that readers of all ages retain and understand more information from a printed text than they do from content on a screen—a finding now backed by neuroscience. Using EEGs in a rigorously controlled lab setting, researchers at Columbia University’s Teachers College found that 10-to-12-year-olds experienced “deeper reading” on paper. The study, conceived by Karen Froud and published last year, was the first of its kind and should have jolted policymakers and publishers alike into questioning the headlong rush away from print, even as reading scores continue to plummet nationwide.
Meanwhile, with no respect for copyright or intellectual property, Mark Zuckerberg and the Google monopolists Larry Page and Sergey Brin have cornered the advertising market and decimated the newspaper and magazine business. As the former C.E.O. of Berkshire Hathaway, Terry Kroeger, put it, “You can’t help but admire Google’s business model. They have close to zero content-creation cost but are able to turn around and sell the lion’s share of the advertising.” I’m not so polite, so I call them thieves.
While these companies have grown as powerful as some sovereign nations (see: Facebook’s bullying of the Canadian Parliament), there remains one really important government institution they can’t manipulate: the U.S. Postal Service. Big Tech, at least so far, can’t swipe a magazine from a truck or a mailbox and claim that it adds to the cumulative clicks they sell to advertisers.
I don’t expect ads to come flooding back to Harper’s simply because Google has lately lost some major court cases (including a federal anti-trust suit and a $425 million jury award to millions of users for invading their privacy). But until our business is justly compensated—or tech is properly regulated by the government—I won’t be Google’s hostage. As long as paying customers can hold Harper’s in their hands, we have a chance for survival.
Nowadays I urge readers of all kinds to subscribe to mailed publications as a patriotic duty. If they want a diversity of coherent opinion and authentically informed democracy, they need to vote with their wallets. Notwithstanding their bi-monthly broadsheets, Air Mail hasn’t joined my crusade, but it’s never too late to emulate newcomers to print such as Tablet and Highsnobiety, or Spectator World, which just upped its paper frequency from monthly to fortnightly.
Government censorship has returned as a genuine threat in the age of Trump. But as former Hachette C.E.O. Arnaud Nourry once noted, books “can’t be turned off. Facebook or Twitter can be silenced by throwing a switch…. You can’t kill a book after publication, because no security force can track down every book that was sold, and because a single copy is all it takes to start a new fresh publication cycle.” Indeed, the administration at Indiana University appeared to acknowledge this when it shut down the print version of the Indiana Student because its editors insisted on running news inside special promotional issues. (It has since reversed its decision.)
Unlike a digital scroll, print has to be scanned before it can be scraped for the grand larceny known as A.I. training—a small but important impediment. When airport-lounge managers and environmentalists piously tell me they’ve dumped newspapers, magazines, and books to “reduce their carbon footprint,” I have to laugh. Paper uses up renewable trees; A.I.’s insatiable need for electricity and clean water requires exponentially more energy, adding immeasurably to pollution and global warming.
However, there’s another, not-so-concrete reason I remain devoted to print. Let’s call it, after Graham Greene’s novel, the human factor.
On the uptown D train, a few months ago, I held the door open for a young woman who seemed lost on the subway platform. When I reassured her that we were heading where she wanted to go, she found a seat diagonally across the car, while I settled down to read my laser-printed copy of Le Monde.
“What are you reading?” she asked. I explained that I’m half French and like to keep up on the news of my mother’s country; she explained that growing up in India, she saw her father reading a lot of newspapers and became herself a major reader of the printed press. So much so, as she wrote to me later in an e-mail, that “my dad stopped getting newspapers delivered to our house because I was spending more time reading newspapers than my schoolbooks.”
Over the years, I’ve had many such conversations with complete strangers, because the printed page—and the way we readers see one another—somehow doesn’t kill our peripheral vision. I’ve never seen such a connection sparked between two people seated side by side, each staring at his or her own screen, no matter how tightly packed together.
Jimmy Walker, mayor of New York during the Roaring Twenties, famously said, “I’d rather be a lamppost in New York than mayor of Chicago.” Well, I’d rather be an oddball publisher and reader of print than a titan of TikTok or a sultan of social media. With paper comes a territory called independence, where no algorithm ever tells us what to think.
John R. MacArthur is the president and publisher of Harper’s Magazine
