Always a place at the table for tangible media

Opinion: Tangible Media: Obsoletion vs. Opportunity  

Travis Johnson  

Staff Writer  

As a 25 year old Gen Z-er that was born during the height of the Y2K “end of the world” conspiracy, I have come to terms with the sad reality that others around my age, myself included, are part of a faction otherwise known as “pre-internet.” 

During my childhood, my parents made me go outside and play in the mud, play hide-and-seek with other children in the neighborhood and build lasting friendships the old-fashioned way.  

My childhood served as a catalyst for my eventual fascination in physical media such as newspapers, magazines, books and journals.  

A Spider-Man themed workbook filled with difficult word problems taught to me by my mom after school, is what made me the lover of reading and writing I am today.  

All of that to say, digital media has unabashedly taken the limelight from physical media. Kids are scrolling on iPads before they know how to count and engage in parasocial relationships before they even understand what that means.  

Books have been replaced with e-books, newspapers have been digitized and information has been synchronized into a 10 minute or less social media reel while negatively impacting the human attention span.  

While this may sound amazing from a technological standpoint, there is also a standpoint that is being obliterated at the same rapid rate: tangible forms of media.  

Around October of 2025, I was gifted a subscription to The New Yorker Magazine, a weekly publication that has a print and digital version.  

When I received my first New Yorker in the mail, I sat down with it and read the first few articles, and those feelings of nostalgia from the Spider-Man workbook came flooding back.  

Flipping through the pages made me feel like my thoughts and opinions of the world around me were tangible instead of invisibly traveling through satellite systems from one device to another.  

With the subscription comes free access to articles on the New Yorker app as well as digital articles on the website that are not published in the physical magazine.  

I stumbled across an article by Zach Helfand titled, “The Offices Only a Newsperson Could Love,” where he and photojournalist Ann Hermes documented the portrayals of local journalism in action throughout the United States.  

Helfand and Hermes tell stories of hardship and sacrifice while also highlighting the dedication local journalists of local newspapers and newsrooms advocate for daily through the use of physical media. 

“Newspapers, of course, are closing at an emergency-level rate–over the past twenty years, the country has lost more than three thousand,” Hefland said in the article. “Newsrooms are closing even faster, as downsized staffs take refuge in even dumpier dumps.”  

Needless to say, America is just not as interested in print journalism and other forms of physical media as we were around 100 years ago.  

That is where I come in. As a print journalist for this publication and eventually a potential print journalist for publications like The New Yorker, I stand firm in my belief that print journalism must stick around.  

Tangibility, at our core, is what humans seek, so it is our mission as journalists to advocate for print media just as much as we advocate for digital media, if not more.  

Imagine a world where satellites are disrupted and the internet ceases to exist, our digital world of information would be shattered, and we would turn to physical means of communication and information gathering.  

That is why, even in our digital-dominated world, classic forms of media must never die.  

From a man that started as a little boy with a Spider-Man workbook, to now writing to thousands of students, I am writing this with hope that someone will read it and be inspired to give tangible media a seat at their table.