I might be leaving, but print isn’t…

A week from today I will graduate from Chico State.  From here I know that my priorities, goals and career opportunities will  change and evolve. I’m leaving behind floating on Memorial Day weekend, beautiful fall and spring foliage on campus and many great people I have met.

But as I leave Chico, I know there is one thing I won’t leave behind–the constant balance between embracing traditional print media and the online world that also demands much attention. I am sure that my relationship with these two forces will also evolve.  As people cry “the print media is dead!” I tend to agree with William Powers that the journey has just begun.

In “Hamlet’s Blackberry: Why Paper Is Eternal,” Powers says that “the persistence of paper flies in the face of a widely held popular assumption about technology, propagated over the years by breathless futurists and science-fiction writers.”  Powers doesn’t say that we are all imagining a change world for journalism and reading materials; just that the pace with which print will die shouldn’t be assumed.  He continues this discussion in another article about the convulsions taking place today.

Powers refers to this age as the “digital messianism,” and says that rather than assuming that paper is dying, ” a wiser approach is to make no assumption whatsoever about paper’s worth, relative status or future, and focus instead on how it does its job, right now and in the real world.”  He also discusses the idea of the electronic pinata, where the inside is comprised of new technologies, used to produce the paper crust of the pinata. His example is of how newspapers are created, through typing on computers, Web research and printing technologies, all to create the end result: a print newspaper.

In the future, I plan to take Powers’ analysis to heart.  In journalism I have learned that learning comes from gleaning information and using all resources.  As a PR professional, I know that my career will require that I am a lifelong learner and that I embrace new trends and ideas with flexibility and enthusiasm.

I have found a couple very helpful profiles to follow on Twitter, whose tweets revolve specifically around the subject of whether the print media is dying or whether is it alive.  For now, I think I am the only one leaving…print isn’t.