Good Writing is Still Best Savored in Print

If you want to read a good story, one that will make a good day great or a cruddy day tolerable, go to a local store and purchase the June 28, 2009 issue of Sports Illustrated. The cover story features big league catcher Joe Mauer, who is chasing a .400 batting average this season. His is a fine story, but the gem of the issue is the one pictured to left, "The Way It Should Be" by Thomas Lake. The picture is of the issue opened up on top of my wife's laptop with a post-it note in the middle saying "Read this."

Lake's essay tells the now-famous story of Mallory Holtman and Liz Wallace, who helped opponent Sara Tucholsky record her first and only collegiate home run. Tucholsky tore her anterior cruciate ligament while rounding the bases. These two opponents, led by Holtman, literally carried her around the bases, helping her touch each one along the way. You can see the a video essay by ESPN at the end of this post, but you should really read the story first.

To be sure, this is a great character story, but that is not my point. My point is that Lake's telling of the story makes one of the great character-though-sports moments of my life better, and reading it in print enabled me to savor the story in a way that a digital edition just cannot. The article is filled with anecdotes of how the story affected very different people all over the country and puts Holtman's act in the larger context of her story.

I began reading the article at the lunch table, and then I wadded up the magazine and took it to another room. Then phone calls interupted and I set it, open, on my desk. On the way back to work I picked it up and scanned where I left off. Taken again by the story, I was forced to sit down and finish the last few paragraphs. Along the way the pages were stained a bit by the oils of the bread from my sandwhich. The magazine had been opened and closed, pages folded and unfolded and krinkled. All of this indicated that the magazine had been handled quite a bit. Thus, the folded up pages on my wife's computer, stained by my finger prints, with the hand-written note communicated much more than the words on the note. It said, "This really moved me" in a way that cannot be replicated by an email or Facebook link or even a post-it note on a Kindle. I would like to think that this is significant, as my wife longs for the intimacy of knowing my thoughts, and like most men what I'm "feeling" often goes without notice.

Good writing is still best savored in print. Indeed, there is something about print that makes good writing qualitatively better, especially when it is shared.

It is a funny convergence, this reading of the Lake essay today, as I had been thinking about print and digital media since Friday, when Robb Krecklow, the publisher of the Van Wert Times Bulletin and a member of my congregation, published a column on how print media is still very much around, even if the digital revolution is changing things. I would love for the paper to start putting Robb's column up on the web.

Wait.

Perhaps that would defeat part of the purpose.