The holidays may be over, but we all received one last gift: the light blanket of snow on Monday. Not enough to cause trouble but enough to make everything look pleasing. I took advantage of the stillness of the day to go for a run near Dennings Point and work on my New Year’s motto.
I’m done with resolutions. They’re too arbitrary and too hard to keep. Instead, I pick a motto. One year, it was: “You have to want to do it.” I had been battling chronic procrastination, so I focused on the positive. Mustering up the enthusiasm to clean the kitchen late at night is difficult, so I’d focus on how happy I’d be in the morning to not wake up to a sink full of pots and a cloud of fruit flies.
This year’s motto comes from everyone’s favorite self-help guru, the Nieman Journalism Lab. At the end of each year, it asks journalists and pundits to predict where the industry is headed. One foresees the resurgence of print.
I love print. Perhaps you do, too. Perhaps you are reading this in print. If you are, you can luxuriate in the deep sense of calm that comes from knowing that, at no point during our time together here, will we be separated by a pop-up ad. The newspaper you are holding is only trying to be a newspaper, not a phone, weekly digital planner, jukebox, emergency broadcast service and packed dive bar where everyone is screaming at you.
Print allows for surprise: You turn the page, see something you know nothing about and become fascinated. An algorithm will never surprise you because it will only show you what you already like. Print means you found it yourself instead of waiting for algorithmic tides to wash it upon your social media shores.
If your social media shores are anything like mine, they are increasingly strewn with garbage. They put journalistic institutions on equal footing with influencers and grifters, as if Mark Zuckerberg grabbed your paper and replaced 19 of the 20 pages with memes and AI-generated photos.
It may get worse. This week Meta, the company that runs Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp, announced it is getting rid of its fact-checking team. If you read something in print, someone almost certainly looked it over before it went to the printer. On social media, well, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
In that Nieman poll, Aimee Reinhart, an Associated Press manager, responded: “The coming year will prioritize focus over immediacy.” That’s my motto. I don’t consider myself a pundit, but I feel confident saying a lot is going to happen in 2025.
A few people have told me that they plan on tuning out the news for the next few years. I get it, but it only benefits people with terrible intentions. Instead, I’d encourage you to think about ways to engage with the news at a slower pace. Maybe tune out all week and catch up in print on weekends. Maybe it’s less social media and more documentaries and long-form journalism. “This isn’t about disconnecting from news,” said Reinhart. “It’s about creating healthier boundaries that let us focus beyond the latest grievance.”
The motto doesn’t just work for news. It will behoove all of us to make sure we are setting aside time on a regular basis to simply think and process. Maybe it’s looking out the window on the train instead of your phone. Maybe it’s a walk or meditation or just staring at the bird feeder for a few minutes.
Or maybe it’s the first Monday after the holidays and there’s a light snow falling. You go for a run to Dennings Point, without headphones. It’s the beginning of the week and there are innumerable tasks that you probably should be doing, but you go out into the cold and the quiet, to the stillness of Fishkill Cove, look out across the water to Storm King ringed with clouds, and stop. The wind softly picks up. Across the cove, a bald eagle spreads its wings and takes off.
