Why Print: On Newspapers, Democracy, and the Things a Screen Cannot Replace

Politics has become strangely empty. We sign petitions with a click, make five-dollar donations with a tap, and mistake engagement for participation.

Capitol Hill Citizen believes that democracy requires something more substantial than that. It requires attention, presence, and involvement. It requires something tangible.

That is why we print a newspaper.

In the absence of tangibility, we are each reduced to data, data that corporations use to manipulate us, predict us, and sell us back to ourselves. In a world where corporations are treated as people under the law, Capitol Hill Citizen calls upon its readers to do something that a corporation cannot do: hold a newspaper. Better yet, do democracy.

Democracy requires action. That means showing up, which is exactly what our journalists do as they report from the frontlines of the institutions that shape our lives. And it is what our readers do when they carry that reporting back into their communities. Action means feeling the paper, engaging with your fellow human beings, and speaking to people face to face.

Human engagement is the first thing the machine strips away from us.

Doing things with your hands, with that which distinguishes you from the machine, is a revolutionary act. We are living, breathing human beings with emotions and feelings, sights and smells. To hold a newspaper is a small reminder that we still inhabit bodies, communities, and a democracy that exists somewhere beyond the screen.

We strive for a world in which we are informed with the paper in our hands—a world in which we run with that paper to our elected representatives and demand, “What the hell are you doing? Why aren’t you addressing this? It’s on page 14. Look at it.”

To read Capitol Hill Citizen is to refuse to disappear into the churn of algorithm-driven news cycles and superficial political opportunism. We put Capitol Hill Citizen on every congressmember’s chair. And every congressmember does the same thing: they move it. But at least they move it.

This is not merely Golden Age thinking. We do not want things to go back to how they used to be. We want to take back something that has been stolen from us: the tangible, the embodied, the uniquely human. We want to read print.

This article first was first published in the Capitol Hill Citizen, an independent antiwar print newspaper for citizens done with the corporate duopoly and the internet addictions that keep the citizenry depressed, dejected, distracted and defeated. It appears at Common Dreams with permission.