Paper Media Poll: Books' Uptick Crosses Periodicals' Decline

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Paper media is terrestrially social. No smartphone backside shows to fellow commuters what its owner is reading. But May 2019 was a mixed turning point in the Paper Media Poll. The debut of spring showed a nadir of paper periodicals seen "in the wild" by the Paper Pollster team, tallying just one copy of The Economist for the entire month. With heavy hearts we pressed on. Belatedly, only in hindsight, our team noticed an undeniable climb of paper books seen in the hands of public transit commuters and coffee shop denizens, which included many a GenZ pedestrian.

But that same sad month for periodicals that was May showed something else we weren't looking for: UC Berkeley students' posture straightened considerably from mere weeks before when, en masse, they walked hunched over their phones through the end of April. Now they stand straight, look where they're walking and make eye contact. What happened?

A late GenZ/early Millenial eastbound commuter spotted reading The Brothers Karamazov by Dosteyevsky told our team he's following the advice of Cal Newport, the computer science professor and social media resistor.

Also spotted in the wild is a new book by the true crime journalist Paul Drexler titled Notorious San Francisco. The reader who'd attended the author reading two nights earlier was 40% of the way through the anthology, and recommended it highly.

Several books whose titles we didn't record were spotted. From memory, the team counted four copies of George Orwell's 1984 being toted or read by commuters since May.

Millenial Jenny Odell, author of How To Do Doing Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy pulled in a standing-room-only audience to Moe's Books in Berkeley last Tuesday.



Periodical Graveyard
Mad magazine announced plans to stop new issues at the end of this year. Magazine directors will publish occasional "best of" issues by culling material from its vast archives. (1952-2019)

Governing magazine, which every City Hall reporter country wide knows well, was sold to Scientologists in 2009. Governing announced on August 7th it too is shuttering. (1987 - 2019)

Pacific Standard magazine's editor-in-chief announced on twitter the publication will put out no more issues. (2008 - 2019)

Periodicals Born Tally: 0

Podcasts Born Tally: many 🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️



<-- Paper Media Poll: GenZer Wants Print, Asks How Long Intact Racks Have 'Been Broken' |






This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

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