In the twenty-first century, there is almost nothing you can’t do on your phone, the Internet, or both. As many aspects of our daily routines have been transformed by technology, our news consumption has also become accessible in this way. As a journalism student, I rely primarily on my ongoing media literacy learning process to stay informed about daily news from digital newspapers to combat disinformation.
The idea for this article came to me a few weeks after a very interesting discussion in my Introduction to Journalism class, which covered the evolution and transformation of the press. The media has been adapting its forms of communication, especially since World War I with the invention of radio, then TV, and so on. However, the physical newspaper was around not long after Johannes Gutenberg revolutionized the printing press and introduced it to Europe and America in 1450. The first record of a newspaper published regularly was the “Relation” by Johan Carolus in 1605. It’s an incredible thing that newspapers are still being printed all these centuries later, even when communication experts have an ongoing debate of whether it will become obsolete. This controversy has only grown since the emergence of digital newspapers and social media because of the immediacy they have to offer.
I spent a week getting my news from local newspapers in Puerto Rico, such as El Vocero, Primer Hora, and Metro, to see if there was any change in my engagement, the content, or any significant differences between physical and digital press. This experiment was cut short to five days instead of seven, since those are the days I routinely stop in the morning on my commute to college at a gas station or a panadería where they have a variety of newspapers. Primera Hora and El Vocero print Monday through Friday, so I started my observations on Monday, October 13, 2025, and finished on Friday, October 17, 2025, a day after Metro publishes their weekly newspapers (Thursday).
To be completely honest, throughout the entirety of that week I felt a little pretentious for reading the physical newspaper, especially when I got to the classroom with the paper in hand with only a few news left to read. I have yet to explore the meaning behind this sensation. This didn’t stop me, however, from selecting the news that caught my attention the most. When reading the paper, I could get an amplified view of the news for the day, whilst on my phone I depended on receiving a notification of a headline and reading it instantly, since the design of digital news pages are less saturated looking than the paper. The tabloid format of the newspapers helped me in the process of selecting authentically and confidently which notes to read, and in what order. The tabloid format — used by all Puerto Rican newspaper companies because of its affordability — is characterized by bold titles accompanied by telling images with a body text and half of a sheet that holds two or more reports.
My engagement and understanding of what I was reading improved when using the print edition. Separating a moment in my day to just read the paper not only made me more aware of short news, such as police reports and government notices that can be overshadowed by big and exciting headlines, but also contributed to my knowledge as a citizen. An example of one of these instances is on Primera Hora’s release on Friday, October 17, page 8 on the right side of the sheet, where they shared the news of the “Teodoro Moscoso” scholarship. Even though I knew the scholarship was announced throughout social media and in the digital release later that same day, I noticed how I intentionally took the time to search for information of value to me; information that can’t be recreated so easily on our electronic devices with an algorithm suggesting what we should read.
I recognize the popular idea of newspaper reading as a “depressing activity.” Although, I have to say that the physical print format was a respite from how busy and distracting the digital version is with the pop-up ads, the constant influx of notifications and, overall, the attachment I may or may not have to my phone and the other — very entertaining — apps in it. The static nature of the physical newspaper made it easy for me to navigate and process the information. This phenomenon can also counteract, at a surface level, the slant or bias with which we conduct our search for information in the media. I believe that reading the physical release might alleviate the levels of stress some people experience when reading, watching, or listening to the news.
I find it interesting that the printed newspaper is still considered a form of media that might disappear when, as someone who was born into a time where digital news is the norm, I found it to be nostalgic and preferable. While I continue my introspection of the implications of feeling pretentious reading the paper news, I will embrace or redirect that pretentiousness to encourage you, reader, to read the physical newspaper and become media literate. It is imperative that we stay informed and consume news through mediums that help us combat disinformation, fake news, and information disengagement or avoidance.