Print Deniers Living in “Cloud Cuckoo Land” Says One Digital Evangelist

[responsive]fippinsight[/responsive]Matthew Buckland, a self-proclaimed “digital evangelist” and owner of a digital agency, is on a personal and professional mission to “find truth.” And he’s taken aim at print.

“There are few good things to say about printed media these days,” he asserts in Fipp. “It’s wasteful, inefficient, static, expensive to create and distribute.”

Yet he goes on to say “there is a huge advantage that print has over its digital rivals that perhaps no one could have foreseen.”

What Buckland has come to believe is that print has a great future due to the fact that the digital fire hose has made capturing attention extremely difficult.

“We can only take in so much and we have limited attention to give to media. It’s a concept known as the ‘Attention Economy,’ which treats human attention as a scarce commodity,” he explains.

Print, he has decided, has an edge over digital in that it is “there” in our offline moments, when we are looking for something to engage us. Print exists, he says, in the same physical space that we do, unlike digital media that exists on another plane.

“Ironically — the more pervasive digital media gets, so the more unique and special print media becomes. Ultimately a goal of a media publication is to attract readers, spread its ideas and advertising. If it’s able to cut through the digital noise and get a read out of me, then it is still relevant and still has a life,” Buckland asserts.

“Are those who say print is dead living in cloud cuckoo land?”

Yes, Matthew, yes they are.