The media columnist for Advertising Age, Simon Dumenco, is a very digital kind of guy.

His reading and writing has become overwhelmingly dominated by the internet.

But of late he’s found “the constant adrenaline rush of producing and consuming web content also leaves me feeling a little … lost sometimes”.

In a column headlined “The Joy of Offline Discovery – Or How I Learned to Stop Clicking (Once a Week) and Love Print Again”, he writes:

When you spend your days floating on a cloud of internet ephemera – breaking news, status updates, smart and dumb blog posts alike, tweets, animated GIFs, etc – you can’t help but feel a little light-headed. And unmoored.

And that – combined with a subscription to the Sunday edition of the New York Times – has led this digital native to “rediscover the joy of, well, print discovery”.

In a piece that makes an interesting companion to Evgeny Morozov’s dirge for the cyberflaneur, Dumenco writes:

It’s all about focusing not on whatever I happen to click on next, but on what an international team of editors, graphic artists, journalists, photographers and illustrators have assembled with great care and intention. In surrendering my attention to what they’ve created, I’m reminded how siloed my web-based media consumption actually is …

The lesson I relearn every Sunday is that the discipline of print — the discipline it takes to assemble a compelling, finite package, and the discipline it takes to devote a chunk of your attention to it — still matters.

(Not to mention, as noted earlier this week, the potential for print to make an elegant juxtapositional point.)

His advice for those whose fingers no longer touch newsprint is to try it from time to time (and chucks in an endorsement of the relaunched Advertising Age for good measure).

Dumenco concludes:

I’m convinced that if you emerge from your webby rabbit hole long enough to spend a little time with the newfangled, old-fashioned Ad Age each week, you’ll be amply rewarded.

(Did I mention, by the way, that the NZ Listener is available in a weekly print edition? More here.)