What HKS Students Lose by Not Having Physical Newspapers and Magazines

Walk into any public library in Boston, Cambridge, or Somerville—or in most cities across the country—and you will find physical copies of the “New York Times,” “Washington Post,” and “Wall Street Journal,” alongside a few magazines. But walk into the Harvard Kennedy School of Government library, and you will not find any print periodicals—to access those publications, you need to go online or across the river to the Business School. 

With reading online being the default mode of news consumption for an overwhelming majority of Americans, I am confident that few of us have noticed this absence. For a group of students that cares so deeply about understanding the world’s problems and their manifold complexities, this is a pity. To truly engage with the news we consume, we need print newspapers and magazines, and we should care about having easy, convenient access to them in our own library.

I am grateful to have free digital access to the best English-language publications through HKS, but reading on a screen is simply a different experience from reading print media. If you read the “Boston Globe,” for example, on your computer or a mobile app, you are attempting to perform a cognitively demanding task on two of the most distracting technologies ever invented. You may receive a text and feel compelled to respond. Or, you may click on a hyperlink attached to the op-ed you are reading. Next thing you know, you have spent 10 minutes on Emmanuel Macron’s Wikipedia page, ordered a blender and two new pairs of pants, but have not read past the first paragraph. 

Research shows that if you shift your attention from one cognitive task to another, it will take 23 minutes to fully reestablish the deepest level of attention and focus. In other words, if you read online and regularly divert your attention, you are limiting the depth of your engagement with the piece.

Even if you turn notifications off, you know that a whole world of distraction is just a click of the mouse away; avoiding the temptation becomes an active effort.

But it is not just the potential for distraction; it is the screen itself. Studies have demonstrated that when people read on screens, they scan and scroll. They read the headlines and their eyes dart around looking for the most important information. This makes it much harder for the brain to deeply engage with complex details and nuances the way we do when we have nothing but pieces of paper in front of us. 

There is nothing inherently wrong with skimming. Sometimes it is necessary and practical. If there were a breaking news story, I would likely go online just to skim the most pertinent details. Not all reading has to be deep reading, and casual reading is perfectly fine to do online. But we should be honest in recognizing that these are two entirely different activities.

Granted, there is some phenomenal content on news publications’ websites, like interactive data visualizations or op-docs, that cannot be reproduced on paper. In many cases, newspapers will let you know in the print edition when they have published such content online, so there is no reason why our default mode of news consumption should be digital. 

We need to be sure we are taking the time to deeply engage with analysis of current affairs, which includes the focused reading of longer pieces. If we get our news primarily from the internet, we will likely be more up to date on the latest remark Trump made during an Oval Office meeting with a world leader. But if we rely primarily on print publications, we would gain a deeper understanding of the underlying forces behind the headlines. 

There are few better ways to educate oneself than to grab a physical copy of “The Economist” and read it for an hour uninterrupted. Our library should ideally be facilitating this deep-learning experience. Yet with so little interest in print media in general, it is understandable that the library has deprioritized it.

Most students likely have never noticed the lack of print publications. When I have brought it up to friends and members of the student government, most respond that they never really thought about it and do not seem too bothered. HKS students are perfectly content to read online.

When I asked HKS Manager of Collections & Library Services, Keely Wilczek, about this absence, she explained that the school used to have physical publications. They did not abandon them because the library decided they were not worth having. Rather, HKS is a smaller library than, say, Widener Library; with increasing requests for online access, they allocated the budget away from print publications to address this need. 

“We were really seeing, as far as we could tell, very little use of print,” Wilczek said. “Having budgets, you have to look at, ‘What are people asking for?’ … ‘What’s actually getting used?’”

According to Wilczek, once they were gone, no one requested to bring print editions back. This is precisely the problem. 

The lack of physical news and magazines at the HKS library is a result of a broader reading culture that has shifted online. I cannot fault our library for taking away print publications that students do not value. The library ultimately serves the HKS community, and its offerings simply reflect students’ own choices and the decline of deep reading across America, even at the highest levels of education.

Yet, the library considers every request to acquire a publication that comes in. If enough people request a certain publication, the library will likely acquire it. 

I hope I have convinced at least a handful of HKS students to join me in requesting physical copies of newspapers and magazines. You can find a form to petition by Googling “Purchase Request Form Harvard Library” and clicking on the first link. To request the “Financial Times,” for example, put “Financial Times (print edition)” under “Title and Edition,” and select Harvard Kennedy School Library under “Optional: direct your request to a specific library.” 

As policy students, we need to be deliberate about our reading diets. Bringing back physical publications to the HKS library would be a meaningful step toward deeper engagement with the events that shape the world.

Jonah Shrock (jonahshrock@hks.harvard.edu) is an M.P.P. Candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School, guest writing for the Independent.