Point Blank
laquino@theguidon.com
#LASTPRINTISSUE.
That was the digital age making an imprint on our increasingly post-Gutenberg world—to be precise, in the form of a Twitter hashtag on the cover of the last ever print edition of Newsweek, dated December 31, 2012.
Contrasting emotions perhaps came on the heels of Newsweek’s abandonment of print. In the case of the editor of Katipunan, The GUIDON’s online magazine, however, he spoke like a true creature of our times. Upon receiving his last ever subscription copy of Newsweek, he posted on Instagram: “Print is dead. Viva la revolución!”
Newsweek’s 79-year run as a print magazine was an amazing one. It brought journalism to the frontlines of world history for the greater part of the last century, and everyone’s going to remember it for that.
The thing about history, though, is that it shapes even the things that chronicle it. After all, Newsweek is hardly the first journalistic outfit to have pulled the plug on print. In the United States, for example, two major regional newspapers, The Rocky Mountain News and The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, both fully shifted to online operations back in 2009. The music magazine Spin also published its final print issue last September, also in favor of going all digital.
In the Philippines, there is the case of Newsbreak, which forayed into the game of print as late as 2001 but made the dash for web just as quickly in 2005. It is now fully integrated into the online news start-up Rappler.
All these things are leading many in The GUIDON to ask difficult questions about the future of the student paper. Even for a small publication like ours, the limitations of print are clear and the conveniences of digital all too convincing.
The GUIDON’s print edition, for example, currently has a circulation of 3,600 issues every month. Compare that to theguidon.com’s marked increase in visits and hits this school year (thanks to the hard work of our online and social media teams): from June to December 2012, the site received a total of more than 116,000 unique visitors, amounting to more than 213,000 visits and 3.9 million hits. The numbers speak for themselves.
Nevertheless, there is no urgent or compelling need for The GUIDON to abandon print altogether. In fact, I do not see a full shift to digital happening in the next ten years, simply because it is unnecessary at the moment to do away with the monthly print releases. In contrast to Newsweek or other mainstream publications that have abandoned print, The GUIDON is not profit-oriented anyway—financial viability is not really a question.
These concerns notwithstanding, there is much reason to be excited. The GUIDON has been online since 2000, but it was only in the last few years that emphasis has been put on the online medium to the degree that it is now. In fact, this school year, The GUIDON has even established a social media team and a multimedia staff, in order to make its online operations more fruitful.
But we’d like to hear from you. After all, it is you, our readership, who we carry out this 83-year-old operation for. What do you think? Where should The GUIDON be headed in the next few years?
Email us at feedback@theguidon.com, call us, leave us a note at MVP 201—it’s your choice. These days, we’re really just a tweet away.
