History is Made. It's a Good Day for Print

Search the newsstands of New York City today and you won't find a copy of The New York Times anywhere. They're all sold out. Editor & Publisher reports that The New York Times is printing another 50,000 copies. The Washington Post is planning to print at least 150,000 copies of an extra edition in response to the overwhelming demand for today's paper, which reports on yesterday's historic presidential election.

Who says print is dead? If you're looking for a souvenir to pass along to your grandchildren, you're not going to print out a copy of Huffington Post, you're going to head to the newsstand. 

I'm reminded of the day about a week after 9/11, when the newsweeklies finally hit the stands, and we New Yorkers rushed out of the apartments to get our hands on them. We had all seen the same video footage over and over again. But for some reason we urgently needed to see and hold and pore over still images in print.   These publications offered us a different, more thoughtful way of considering the horrors we had experienced. The magazines were the first memorial. Then,  as today, the printed record of an astonishing event sold out immediately.

I better lock away the late edition of The New York Times I managed to snag this morning.

Comments

[Olivier Laurent]

A copy of yesterday's New York Times is now worth $200 on eBay! And that's just the day after... how much will it be worth in a two, 10 or 50 years?