Thank you for deigning to scribble a few lines of thoughtful prose during what appears to have been a nearly frantic morning of duties and responsibilities. I know how the pressing issues of capitalism combine with the unrelenting tasks of running a large estate with servants underfoot. It’s a miracle we get our pipes smoked at all!

After contemplating your most salient points, I cannot help but heartily agree with you once more, just as I did that night at the Ritz. You’ll recall the laugh we shared razzing our host over his belief that this newfangled eye-patch or eye-pad would amount to a hill of beans. Who wants to wear an eye-patch, much less an eye-pad? We and the King’s navy spent far too much in blood and treasure driving pirates from our shipping lanes to make merry with such language! He deserved the harsh upbraiding we delivered. Your last repartee was particularly piercing. I remember I almost spilt my sherry in merriment.

I’m off to run my typewriter factory. There seems to be no end to demand for these clever contraptions! My grandson will certainly enjoy handing over my typewriter empire to his own grandchildren someday.

Tally-ho!

Winfred, my manservant, just handed me a print-out of your “blog” pamphlet. Ordinarily I spend the morning pursuing the news of the republic in the Gray Lady before taking the hounds out for a constitutional. However, I feel that I must detour from my morning routine to offer a corrective to your broadsheet.

Firstly, I would like to object to the notion that university students should be writing newspaper columns at all. Those hippies should be delivering newspapers, not writing them.

Secondly, if there is any possibility that those mop headed yodelers might tour again, we must restart the volcano in Iceland immediately to forestall their transatlantic crossing.

Thirdly, I think we are experiencing a case of signal-lag. Quality signals take time to develop. We have learned over the course of decades that publication in certain venerable papers and journals is a signal of quality. Those papers and journals are, in turn, venerable because they have published many good articles/papers over the decades. And so it goes. When there is a tectonic shift, however, the signals are still describing the old landscape and take time to reorient themselves. What is puzzling about Professor Koretzky comment is that even the lagging signals do not distinguish between print and online. While obviously a student journalist would prefer to be published in the New York Times or the Washington Post as opposed to some beatnik’s pamphlet page, no quality signals I am aware of differentiate between whether an article appears in good old fashioned newsprint or via some godforsaken Babbage machine. An article in the Gray Lady is an article in the Gray Lady regardless of what format it is printed on.

I have now delayed my constitutional long enough. After I am done walking the hounds I must check in on the factory – buggy whips do not make themselves!

Another reason to keep print around: the National Library of Medicine has different rules for PubMed acceptance for print journals versus online-only journals. If you’re online-only, then you must archive all your articles somewhere like PubMed Central in order to get into PubMed. Many publishers prefer to keep control over access of their back issues, rather than ceding to the NLM’s rules and I know of several who keep their journals in print editions just to get around this regulation.

Print is selective because of scarcity (or, put another way, because it’s expensive to use and deliver). Dealing with this kind of scarcity can lead to many behaviors, including running articles that are too brief, editors who spend too much time “playing to the crowd” (printing the same coverage in an LA paper as in a NY paper because delivery is difficult), and materials that are thinned of important dimensions (data sets reduced to 2D illustrations) because of the limited functionality and scarcity of print. Scarcity means selection, and this selection is not always driven by quality, and it doesn’t always achieve quality. In fact, most often these days, print has the same content as the online version but with inferior distribution abilities. So, the scarcity of print actually inhibits online quality because we don’t write for online’s abundance.

Also, let’s not forget that print, in many, many instances, is only as large or long as the advertising budget allows. So, as scarcity of advertising has increased, print space has decreased. There’s not much pure about that kind of bargain.

My point was that print scarcity equating to quality is a familiar (wrong, but familiar) correlation. However, print’s perceived superiority is being driven more now by ego and vanity rather than effectiveness.