In praise of print

The events of the past weeks have been not only historic, but encouraging.

Like thousands of others in Florida, I took advantage of voting early.

I had to wait an hour and a half before I actually had a ballot in hand, but it was well worth the wait.

I would've waited longer, if necessary.

Filing in those little blank ovals almost made me feel as if I were back in school again, taking the SATs or GREs.

Like so many others, I watched the news on Election Day and saw the long lines snaking through neighborhoods. In state after state, there were accounts of waits as long as four or five hours.

It was stunning, how many people came out to vote.

It was also stunning how unprepared we seem for large turnouts. Every year officials bemoan how many registered people don't vote. (Kind of shocking, actually, when you think of how hard women and people of color had to fight to win the right to vote.)

But the truth seems to be that officials really aren't prepared for all Americans to show up to vote.

A number of things stuck me these past couple weeks, and some of them just nudged the journalist in me. For example, one thing I noticed, watching report after report of people waiting hours to vote: the vast majority of them seemed to be just standing there, doing nothing but waiting on line.

Why weren't more people reading?

They knew they were going to have a long wait. Why didn't more people bring a book with them, a newspaper, a magazine?

Have we become such an aliterate nation that we don't take the opportunity to read when faced with long waits?

Obama's acceptance speech was electrifying, moving. Like many others, I wept upon hearing his stirring words of hope, unification and healing for our country.

I began to wonder if this is a new era for our nation. But not only in all the obvious ways that we hope for: positive change, better relations with other countries, getting our troops out of Iraq.

On one level, it's just great to hear a president-elect who can put sentences together, who can think on his feet, who can speak with nuance. On another level, I wondered if somehow we can become a nation that will move past sound bites, a nation that will actually sit and listen to speeches 40 minutes long or more. That we'll listen to complex speeches, then discuss them afterwards: their meaning, their ramifications. Even their poetry.

We seem to have elected someone who longs to communicate with us; are we a nation willing to take the time to listen?

Another thing struck me, the day after Election Day: the run on newspapers. The public, who lately has been so diffident to newspapers ("Oh, I get all my news on the Internet"), scooped them up in astounding numbers, causing them to run out. They even gobbled up copies of Time and Newsweek. Newsstands everywhere experienced shortages.

I know some did it for historic reasons; a friend of mine says she wants to show her young children that when they were young, the United States elected its first black president. ("By then, they'll probably say, 'Yeah? So what's the big deal,'" she hopes.)

Some probably bought them, thinking they'll be worth money. (Of course, if everyone else owns a copy too, then they're not rare at all.)

But as someone who works in the industry, I found it interesting that people still flocked to newspapers.

They already knew the news: they already knew Obama had defeated McCain.

Yet, they wanted this unique piece of paper with words and images.

Not blogs.

Not the Internet.

Not the transitory news or cable show.

Newspapers.

The hold-it-in-your-hands tangible form of communication that, thank God, is still not dead.

Everything is transitory. Everything changes.

But for a once-in-a-lifetime historical occasion, you need something that has equal weight, equal gravity.

And that something was a newspaper.