At home they pull the paper apart – mom takes this section, dad gets another. On the dining room table or the living room floor, they do things with this bundle which you can’t do at the office – something that is becoming a luxury in our fast-moving, always-on-the-go, notification-saturated digital age.

Why do they buy a Sunday paper when news is on mobile, and while “the news” should supposedly be free? They do it because a Sunday paper is not “the news”. What we sell, with some success, is an immersive experience. Quality time with good information. During this time, the “screen” you look at will not be like the screen on a mobile device. It is bigger – one metre across compared to 12cm on an iPhone 7.

It is also static with zero interruptions, no pop-ups. What you see is not just a snapshot of whatever just happened, nor is it constantly updated with venomous comments. A Sunday paper is a carefully curated selection of must-reads, presented in a format which makes immersion and engagement more likely. Exclusive investigations, large portrait photographs, and a tactile element which reminds readers that while digital content is essential and we are more readily touched by that which we can touch.

It’s IMAX close up but without the noise. A gourmet meal, not a takeaway. Print readers stumble more easily upon stories they did not choose to see, for this is a collection put together not by an algorithm that gives you more and more and more of what you say you want, or of what you wanted before, but of that which a passionate team of avid readers and news hounds believe you should know if you call yourself curious, and want to call yourself well-informed.

Jack Shafer, a veteran online journalist on Politico.com, says, “What accounts for print’s superiority? Print – particularly the newspaper – is an amazingly sophisticated technology for showing you what’s important, and showing you a lot of it. The newspaper has refined its user interface for more than two centuries. Incorporated into your newspaper’s architecture are the findings from field research conducted in thousands of newspapers over hundreds of millions of editions. Newspaper designers have created a universal grammar of headline size, typeface, place, letter spacing, white space, sections, photography, and illustration that gives readers subtle clues on what and how to read to satisfy their news needs.” 

Print retains the element of surprise. The production of a newspaper is an act of exclusion and inclusion: An editor’s primary task remains to supervise the sourcing and production of fantastic content not available elsewhere, but as important is the discipline of saying no to that which is just not good enough. What’s good enough, we print. The noise? No thanks.

Reading print, Shafer writes, slows people down. Which makes a Sunday the best time to be selling a paper, and which makes a Sunday paper the best way to reach an audience with messages you actually want them to take to heart.

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