In Praise of Print
The newspaper's genius is putting them together in a way that highlights connections and implicit categories, and that shows off enough of each to quickly tell you what you need to know.
It's like a shopping mall of news; you don't have to enter every store to have any fun. Just peering in the windows -- scanning the pictures and captions, passing over the headline and pull-quotes and the lead sentence, noting the story's placement -- can be worthwhile.
The print paper perfectly accommodates such shallow regard for certain stories. As you flip through it, you'll see the piece there on the International page and will be able to quickly glean from its design whether it merits your further attention.
Even if you decide it does, you still don't have to read the whole thing to get what you need from it -- just look at the caption and the photograph, or quickly cast your eye over keywords in the first few paragraphs. There, now you know all you need. Next story!
-- Salon.com's Farhad Manjoo's poetic paean to print newspapers. Amen, Farhad