David McLean

Remember magazines? I worked at an ad agency that had a huge library of all the magazines that covered our clients’ various industries. Since we were based in High Point, NC, we did a fair amount of home furnishings work, so there were mostly home magazines…we call them “shelter books.”

It was actually considered a night out with my wife to go to the office and let her borrow an armful of Traditional Home, Metropolitan Living, Architectural Digest, Country Living and whatever short-lived niche magazines a publisher was printing. And they smelled so good! All that rich ink on glossy paper.

Lately, I’ve been walking to the public library once a week to catch up on periodicals. The experience of hoofing it a half mile to a public space and trolling down an Ikea-like shelf of magazines is therapeutic in itself. It’s fun to actually snatch up the eye candy covers of Fast Company, Inc and Forbes instead of wearing my eyes out nibbling on Web versions of the same.

I’ve had one Western healthcare provider and two Eastern healthcare providers tell me to get off my computer more. So check that off my wellness to-do list.

But it also jogs my business mind to come at information from the hardcopy perspective for a change.

For starters, you don’t look for some very specific minutia in a finite set of search terms that you load into a search window. You look for content categories. I think of it like looking for flavors of information. Fast Company has one flavor of information, Harvard Business Review has another. And this is just the business magazines. When it comes to The New Yorker, I have no patience whatsoever to read that online.

You take what the editor gives you. What the editor gives me might not be anything that was on my mind at the moment. But maybe it turns a light bulb on in my head. So I take a seat next to a guy in his best interview suit looking at want ads and read good old fashioned printed paper.

That’s all. No huge revelations.

But what hardcopy offers that is different from the Internet, bodes consideration. The Web isn’t “better” than print. It’s different. The process of using hardcopy informs me differently than reading a link someone forces on me in an e-mail.

Magazines, newspapers and brochures are down now, but they’ll come back in a big way once readers and advertisers rethink their habits, as we always do.