Are you reading this on a printed page? If so, some might argue that what you’re holding in your hands is possibly an endangered species. Sure, the printing press was all the rage during the Industrial Revolution, but it seems the only reason people want to talk about print nowadays is to discuss its imminent death. Worldwide, the prognosis is grim. In Australia, our two big newspaper houses are culling staff in record-breaking numbers, book consumers are switching to electronic readers and magazine titles are dying off by the dozen. It’s like we’ve all developed a sudden allergy to paper. But while the grand old sauropods of the industry sink into a bog, what becomes clear is that print itself isn’t actually in danger. If anything, smaller, boutique and niche print titles are thriving.

Take Australia’s youngest newspaper, The Saturday Paper. Since its launch this March, 80,000 copies of the paper’s crisp 32 pages are trundled out to east coast city newsagents and airports each weekend. Launching a newspaper – in the same period Fairfax and News Corp make hundreds of employees redundant – might seem like lunacy, but what helps The Saturday Paper’s case is that it’s published by Schwartz Media, whose stable includes The Monthly, Quarterly Essay and Black Inc. Books. Still, why opt for pulp? Hasn’t the decline of newspapers worldwide demonstrated that in the 21^st century, paper is the worst medium to disseminate news?

The Saturday Paper’s editor Erik Jensen says part of the appeal of making a proper newspaper was paper itself. “My career – quite counter-intuitively for my generation, I suppose – has been fixed solely around print titles,” he says. Mr Jensen started writing for The Sydney Morning Herald at 15, became a staff writer at 18, before starting The Saturday Paper in his late 20s. “When the first issue of The Saturday Paper turned up – and this is an extraordinary cliché – it was like seeing a child,” he says. “I spent 18 months in secret building this paper, and many of those days was spent touching different paper stock and closing my eyes and running over the GSM.” Mr Jensen nearly sighs. “They… were glorious days.”

Still, there are also commercial and practical reasons why The Saturday Paper is printed on paper, in contrast to, say, The Guardian, which launched in Australia as a digital-only product. Instead of being a daily news service, The Saturday Paper’s aim was to resuscitate the style of long-form feature journalism that was lost when magazines like The Bulletin in Australia and Newsweek in the United States stopped running print editions. “What we wanted to do was the journalism of a weekly news magazine,” Mr Jensen says. “However, the best way to get that journalism out is to print it on a rolling newspaper press.” As Mr Jensen noted in his first editorial, The Saturday Paper was designed to be a “small but handsome mongrel”.

Mongrel models might be the key to survival across the print industry. With e-books now on the verge of overtaking printed books (as a percentage of total book sales), it’s curious and heartening to note that literary journals – those anthology-book-magazine hybrids – continue to thrive in Australia. Meanjin, Overland, Griffith Review, Kill Your Darlings, Southerly and Westerly are some of the best known, but the most charming is perhaps the rascally, Melbourne-based The Lifted Brow. (Canadian writer Margaret Atwood described The Lifted Brow as having “the cheek of Dame Edna [and the] weirdness of wombats”).

“I’m not one of those people who masturbates over paper,” says editor and publisher Samuel Cooney. “But I do prefer to read books and the printed word. And now, with the age of the screen, a book or printed publication is a godsend. I mean, how many tabs have I got open right now? 37! I get distracted, reading on the screen. Books, newspapers and printed publications are a way to escape the hustle and bustle of everything.”

Launched in 2007 by Ronnie Scott, each issue of The Lifted Brow has always happily sandwiched emerging and young writers between big local drawcards (Helen Garner, Christos Tsiolkas, Margo Lanagan and Frank Moorhouse have all contributed) and the occasional international superstar (Sheila Heti, Neil Gaiman, Rick Moody, Karen Russell, Tao Lin). Over seven years, what has kept The Lifted Brow appealing to readers has also been its internal survival strategy – to adapt and experiment at a rapid pace. From its first edition – “almost a zine, a level up from photocopied, really,” Mr Cooney says – the journal has morphed into bound book sized affairs, before reaching its current iteration: a magazine printed on newspaper stock. Mr Cooney adds he’s considering changing the format again soon.

For a literary journal that has lasted this long, has over 400 subscribers (respectable for a journal in this country) and sells most of its 1500–2000 copies per issue, The Lifted Brow’s business model is impressive – mainly for the fact that there isn’t really one. Its writers get paid a modest fee for contributions, but no one else involved in The Lifted Brow – from the 17 people who work on editorial and production, to the interns, to Mr Cooney himself – get a dime. Money is raised through subscriptions, grants and events. “It’s a slog and a labour of love,” he says. Mr Cooney doesn’t ask for anyone’s time for more than one day a week. The Lifted Brow, he says, “relies on kindness and hard work”. Which is to say, The Lifted Brow isn’t just a publication; it’s a community of volunteers who not only believe in the product, but have a personal stake in it.

I’m not one of those people who masturbates over paper…
But I do prefer to read books and the printed word.

Broadsheet – Sydney and Melbourne’s food and entertainment quarterly – operates very differently. “We’ve seen [other magazines] come and go,” says founder and publisher Nick Shelton, “but one important difference for us is that we were a commercial operation from Day One. That was always the goal: to be commercially sustainable.” From starting Broadsheet’s Melbourne edition in 2009, Mr Shelton has now built a company that spans both Melbourne and Sydney, produces a print edition distributed in entertainment venues, boutiques, cafés and restaurants, and a website that regularly reaches over half-a-million unique users per month.

The fact Mr Shelton emphasises online clicks – rather than print edition readers – isn’t an accident. Most magazines might consider their websites as complementary to their print flagship publication, but Broadsheet operates in reverse: Mr Shelton started the print edition to get people onto Broadsheet’s website – a dynamic city directory and archive that’s updated daily. “Making a print edition was about figuring out how to get our brand and content into people’s hands,” he says. “We did ask ourselves what we should make. A brochure? A3 magazine? Proper magazine?”

Eventually they went for – of course – a broadsheet newspaper. The obvious clue was the fact they’d already named the website Broadsheet, which took its design cues from handsome newspapers. “The other reason we went for newsprint was it was cheap to produce,” Mr Shelton says. “It’s also an opportunity to showcase the great photography we were getting, and for the writers to write to longer-form stuff. We find longer form pieces work better in print than they do online, so it was an opportunity to approach things a bit deeper.”

The print and online Broadsheet experiences are very different, Mr Shelton says, because “reading online is a ‘lean forward’ experience – you’re actively searching and actively looking, because you want to go out tonight and find out what’s happening in the city. Print is a ‘lean back’ experience – that is, ‘Let me learn something I didn’t know before, and perhaps doesn’t affect my life in any way, except for the fact I’ve just read an interesting story and I’m the wiser for it.”

Similarly, the team at The Lifted Brow are also acutely aware that people absorb information differently across platforms. “There’s a term called ‘shovelling’, where magazines just shovel their content from one platform to the next and assume they will work the same,” Mr Cooney explains. Instead of shovelling, The Lifted Brow has commissioning editors who work across three editions: the flagship print journal, the website and the digital magazine on tablets. “We see the three different iterations of the Brow as three different publications. The flagship publication is the print publication – that’ll always be the case – but there are also limitations to its reach and how far it can go.”

In contrast to the traditional newspaper industry – which often sees the internet as having done nothing but steal audience share and revenue – all three editors and publishers consider a robust digital presence as crucial to making their print products work. And though he is a newspaper man himself, Mr Jensen says his newspaper takes a more pragmatic attitude to the internet. “The internet does ‘certain things’, which allows us to focus on ‘other things’,” he says – namely, investigative and in depth features people are less inclined to read on a computer screen.

Broadsheet’s Mr Shelton says that like Mr Jensen, he still gets a giddy thrill when the print edition of Broadsheet comes off the presses. But for him, the ultimate thrill comes later. “Often, cafés and venues will get Broadsheet before we receive our copies at the office,” he says. “So walking into a café and seeing it there, and someone reading it, that’s when it really hits me. It’s more about seeing someone else hold it. That’s where I get my thrill.” Needless to say, it’s a thrill that remains exclusive to print.

Sydney-based writer Benjamin Law contributes frequently to Good Weekend, The Monthly and Frankie. He’s also the author of The Family Law (2010) and Gaysia: Adventures in the Queer East (2012) - both of which were nominated for Australian Book Industry awards - and co-author of the comedy book Shit Asian Mothers Say (2014) with his sister Michelle.