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Workers print a test edition of the Globe and Mail on the new printing presses at the Intercontinental plant in August, 2010.J.P. MOCZULSKI/The Globe and Mail

The first story I ever published as a journalist ended up on the front page of The Globe and Mail. It was a short article about Tel Aviv's vibrant nightlife in the midst of war, and how young Israelis were steadfastly dancing in discos, despite the threat of suicide bombings. By some sheer stroke of beautiful luck the paper not only accepted my story, but printed it on my birthday.

I can still remember my mother screaming over the phone. After all, this was the paper she read each morning, and she had run out at dawn, to buy up every copy in the neighbourhood. Two days later, a courier arrived at my friend's apartment in Tel Aviv, Isreal with an envelope. I tore it open, and pulled out the neatly folded front page my mother had cut out, which smelled like my family's kitchen table. There was my story, and name, sealed in ink before my very eyes, in a newspaper I'd been brought up to revere. Not a bad start to a career.

I have written countless stories since then, as well as three books, and nothing has ever graced any publication's front page since that first one. But each time I see my name in print, I experience a small version of that initial thrill, which seems to justify everything it takes to make it happen: the fruitless pitches to editors, interviews that go nowhere, countless drafts and a constant cloud of self-doubt that hangs over me right until the moment when I see my idea in its finished state.

These days, that moment is something I largely experience virtually. As the journalism business has tilted increasingly toward digital over the past decades, the opportunities to actually hold my work in my hands are quickly diminishing.

Online publishing has its advantages. When a story goes "live" on the Internet, I can watch its reception in real time. Within minutes, I'll receive messages of praise and scorn from total strangers, compelled to reach out because something I wrote struck a nerve. Each message and comment delivers another hit of adrenalin, buoying my fragile ego for one second, before smacking it around the next.

But one thing has become clear: The more my work moves online, the more I crave the fleeting sense of accomplishment that only print can deliver.

Why?

For one thing, online journalism pays terribly. Digital offers the promise of great riches and limitless exposure, but most of the time it compensates in pennies, if anything at all. All the advertising dollars that were supposed to flee print publications for their online equivalents have instead been dispersed more widely. The classifieds money went to Kijiji and Craigslist, dating ads went to dating apps, and the rest was swallowed by Google and Facebook, which collectively take in three-quarters of all online advertising dollars. Pay rates for print publications may not be what they once were, but they remain vastly higher than what I get paid online, even though the work is identical. Digital offers sizzle, but sizzle doesn't feed a family. I need steak to survive.

Print, meanwhile, remains a stubbornly steady beast. Though bloodied and bruised, most of the newspapers and magazines that were supposed to die off are still selling ads and publishing regularly, including this one. People will still pay money for something they can hold in their hands, and even if that group of readers is smaller than it once was, the dollars they spend (at the newsstand, with subscriptions, and through ads) are undeniably real, and consistently make up the bulk of most publications' revenues. Magazines and newspapers that ditched a certain paper present for a dreamy digital future have come to realize how costly this can be.

But there's something deeper and more emotionally significant to those moments when I see my name in print. The sense of accomplishment feels more real … a physical translation of my ideas and toil, sprayed and pressed onto dead trees, and carried by truck, plane and human being into the hands of someone who cares enough to pay for it. A final product, put out into the world at a set time and price. An object of consequence with quantifiable heft.

Our world is awash in simulations, virtual experiences and products that don't actually exist. Our music, our culture, our news and even our memories largely live as invisible lines of code on distant servers, accessed through the same flat glass surfaces. When digital goods and ideas are ubiquitous in pretty much every aspect of our personal and professional lives, the archaic slices of analog reality we once dismissed are becoming increasingly valuable again.

You see it in the revival of vinyl records and cassette tapes, books and bookstores, and even instant-film cameras, all of which have been growing in recent years, despite the widespread assumption that they would simply be extinct. The more endangered real things have become, the more we seem to want them around.

This is not a logical, practical choice, but it is a deeply human, romantic one. There's no shame in that. I know that the days of seeing my work in print will be even more rare. But that doesn't lessen the pleasure I get when I hold a book I have written in my hands for the first time, see my name embossed on the cover, and think, for one fleeting moment, that once again, it was worth it.

David Sax's latest book, The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter, will be published, in print, on Nov. 8 by Public Affairs. His mother has reserved several dozen copies.

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