A few weeks ago, the Irish Times published their annual Christmas gifts supplement. They had contacted me previously about my website, www.irishdailypaintings.com where I sell my small oils painting studies, with a suggestion to insert an article on it.
It demonstrated to me why print is still vital for advertising. There's something reassuring to buyers about a write up in a newspaper. You can pour all the searchable tags you like into a web site to drive people to your online presence but at the end of it, many people don't see material published on the web as verifiable and authentic. We all know from the movies that a newspaper office is full of caffeine-fuelled editors and journalists, with sleeves all rolled up, endlessly fighting to find the truth. So we know that all the material has been researched by the hacks and verified by a growling cigar-chomping ed, don't we? And that's a good thing. On the internet, it has been said, nobody knows you're a dog; any mutt could claim anything and they frequently do. The trouble is, we all suspect that the claims may be nothing more than piss up a lamp-post -even after evaporation, there's a bad smell and you don't want to park your bike there.
Subsequent to publication, I received many more enquiries [and sales] over two weeks than I had had in the entire year before. Print is not dead. You can't sit in a café and browse comfortably through an old copy of the internet and you can't hide anonymously behind the puff and flummery of a web site and expect people to have faith in you.
Of course, you are reading this on a blog -but I've been verified and passed as authentic by Citizen Kane. So, thank you.
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