Shameless plugging
Why he prefers the Straits Times to news on the Net (12 November 2010)
YESTERDAY’S report (‘Newspapers still relevant: SM Goh’) reconfirms my view that newspapers will always remain relevant.
It is a medium which the Internet and the visual media will never replace.
For instance, a reader can always reach for his newspaper at any time, and it allows him to think and mull over its contents even as he reads. Neither the visual media nor the Internet offers such a convenience.
It takes more than an hour of reading The Straits Times before I can put the paper down.
The paper comes to me like a fresh brew of coffee every day. I can hardly say this about the Internet.
It never fails to amaze and amuse me how people can be so wrong in so few words.
The visual media might never replace newspapers – television and newspapers have coexisted for decades, after all – but the Internet surely will, one of these days. The writer most likely has watched television, but I’m pretty sure he’s not actually been on the internet before, because he seems to think that news websites have mysterious devices that shut them down after midnight or something. These devices also somehow shield perfectly sentient human beings from coherent thought while they are reading news on the Web.
If anything, Internet news is a heck of a lot better because not only can it be access all the time and can be mulled over (unlike what our writer, who is possibly still using stone flints to start his cooking fire, seems to think), one can also access breaking news from another part of the world in a different time zone. Can newspapers break news that way? Not unless they become self-updating. Minority Report is a cool movie for having that, but sadly it still does not exist in the real world.
You have to be a special kind of dinosaur to claim that paper on words is more convenient than the ever-present Internet. But I do agree with the reader that newspapers will always remain relevant – you can’t swat a cockroach with a laptop.
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