I was in a small-group meeting today (related to the Newspaper Association of America’s ongoing strategic planning process), and the print vs. digital debate came up: Should all NAA reports be online-only, or is there value in printing some reports? Do we (or should we) have criteria on which to base those distribution decisions? Does it have to be either-or? (Rob Rubrecht intelligently brought up the times when newspapers have cut the television book only to find some subscribers really wanted it in print.)

Anyway, no one agreed on anything – heck, I couldn’t even agree with myself: It would be nice to be all-digital from an environmental and financial standpoint, but, frankly, sometimes print just gets more attention. (Example: The survey for the NAA Online Operations Performance Report got plenty of responses through e-mail and the Web, but we got even more when we faxed the survey.)  

Then late today, a publisher from a small-town member newspaper called me. He had read somewhere that we had reports from Rich Gordon of Northwestern University. (We do; they’re great, and the reports are available here and here.*)

I knew exactly the reports the caller was talking about, and I suggested that he go online to our GrowingAudience.com site to find them. “No, no, no,” the caller said. He explained that he did not want to “deal with” the Internet. I offered to e-mail him the links, but he wasn’t interested in using e-mail, either. 

To be honest, it took me a few seconds to come up with this solution: I’m going to print them out and snail-mail them. (What’s funny about this is that Gordon’s reports are about creating a sustainable increase in the online audience.)

So, there you go. In the face of an increasingly digital world, there are still people who like to get ink on their fingers. I'll freely admit here to being one of those people. I'm online all week at work and I love it, but by the weekend, my desire to look at any screen is pretty low. I guard my Sunday mornings fiercely, and I spend them with my dog and the newspaper -- yes, the print one -- and some caffeine.

If you’d like to weigh in on how you like to get your NAA publications, reports and more, feel free to do so in the comments here.