A moment captured in time

The effects of Tuesday’s historic election are already being felt. Newspapers in particular experienced a boost in circulation as a result of Obama’s win. Circulation numbers exploded Wednesday as everyone wanted to get their own piece of history. It is reported that kiosks sold out by mid-morning as Americans flooded to newsstands to buy papers with headlines like “Obama makes history” and “It’s Obama.”

The numbers around newspapers sales on Wednesday are not at all surprising, and they reminded me of the key difference between online and print journalism. Online, links change or move and news quickly gets buried beneath blogs and new stories whereas print newspapers give readers something to hold on to…a memento that is theirs for as long as they want to keep it.

Headlines, images and sentiments do not stay on homepages forever, but actual newspapers are unchangeable. In most cases this does not matter because all readers want is to read a story once and move on. So in reality, it does not matter that when they return to a newspaper site, the stories have long since changed.

Newspapers are attributing the spike in sales to finally having something worth writing about. I would argue that on Wednesday November 5, 2008 they were able to write about something historic and memorable. It’s not that recent events have been un-newsworthy, but Obama’s election is the first story in a while that is worth saving.