---
title: "Moving Towards a Manifesto About Online Versus Print Formats"
date: 2009-07-27
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canonical_url: https://idratherbewriting.com/2009/07/27/moving-towards-a-manifesto-about-online-versus-print-formats/
---
# Moving Towards a Manifesto About Online Versus Print Formats
Sometimes people talk about this potential move, from print to an online format, with a doom and gloom that would make you think they're foreclosing on a house or planning a funeral for a close relative or giving up their children for adoption.

When I hear these discussions, it blows me away because I can hardly believe what I'm hearing. I admit, the look and feel of paper can provide a comfortable reading experience if you're immersed in a 200 page novel lying on your bed on a rainy day. But the *Intercom* and other professional magazines or journals are not novels. With professional publications like these, the online format better matches the reading behavior of the audience. In fact, online formats provide more than a dozen advantages that print formats lack, including everything from interactivity to portability, feeds, metrics, multimedia, and more.

I've had some thoughts brewing all week about how people read online, not just online versus print. It's somewhat of a collage of assertions I'm relaying here. The gist of it is that any organization or company would be crazy not to convert their paper-based magazine, journal, or newsletter into an interactive online format.

**Reading Habits.** When it comes to professional, job-related information, most people read on the job, during little breaks, when they're tired of some task, or during the morning when they're checking their e-mail and the news, or during lunch as they're eating, or on the bus or train if they ride one. Some even read a bit in the evenings, but not as much, and rarely do they consume professional, job-related blogs on the weekends. With these reading habits, short online content that is easily accessible from a computer where most people are working better meets the reader's needs. 

**Digestibility.** With articles for online magazines, you can push articles out little by little, several times a week, rather than dumping 20+ articles on readers all at once and overwhelming them, as periodic print magazines do. Because you can push out articles in a more digestible rate, reader consumption of the content increases. Of course if you push out 20 articles at once through an RSS feed, the effect is the same as pushing them out all at once in print.

**Portability.** With online content accessible from portable mobile devices, you can read the content anywhere without forethought or preparation. For example, you can read it while you're waiting in line, waiting for your computer to reboot, when you're in a boring meeting, or alone in the cafeteria, or at church, or in the bathroom, or in the car while your spouse is picking up groceries. Of course you can read a print magazine in similar situations -- if you're always carrying a print magazine in your back pocket. The trouble is, opportunities for reading often sneak up on you at various times of the day. Having the content accessible at your fingertips through a BlackBerry, iPhone, or other device can mean the difference between reading and not reading.

**Interactivity.** With print content, you can rarely talk to the author. But with online articles, you can usually click the author's name and find an e-mail address or contact form, or you can leave a comment below the article, or link to the author's site (which often sends a pingback to the author's email), and you can receive feedback from the author the next hour or day. The ability to interact with the author to share your thoughts and reactions makes reading more of a conversational, personal experience that is more engaging.

**Selection.** Because online forms can draw upon a global audience and stream content from hundreds of sources into a running list with thousands of titles to choose from, you're more likely to find articles that meet your specific, niche interests. In contrast, print magazines usually have only about 10-20 articles and must keep the content at a general interest level. Because the online experience provides such a broad selection, you have greater chances of finding content that is relevant, focused, and applicable to your own interests than with print formats. I wrote about this principle previously in [Damping Versus Selection](https://idratherbewriting.com/2008/02/17/selection-beats-damping-a-brilliant-argument-about-why-blogs-trump-print-media/).