Is there potential peril when school newspapers go online only?

My gut tells me the answer is YES.

I can picture mornings at City High in Iowa City or at Rock Canyon HS in Highlands Ranch, when the school newsmagazine "hit the halls."

Hundreds of students, often just sitting in hallways, poring over the pages of the paper. Sometimes pointing something out to a neighbor. More often just immersed in a particular story.

It was a shared experience that simply can't be replicated by even the most sophisticated student media websites or social media. In a world increasingly lacking the sorts of shared experiences that communities thrive upon (hundreds of TV choices, DVRs, segmented news outlets online, etc.), there is something to be said for the somewhat old-fashioned printed newspaper.

I like the model of combining a strong print publication with strong journalism on a website and reaching readers through various social media. But perhaps that's just me being a bit afraid to commit to new technologies, to the new truth of students being "digital natives."

There is a lot of pressure on high schools to abandon the print publication (due to expense, mostly, but also due to people in power knowing just how much influence a shared experience can have, and seeing the benefit in more diffuse experiences). In schools large and small, urban and rural, the yearbook is the last print publication remaining.

So I worry. Then, for some reason, I come upon two online sources (yes, I understand the irony here) that support my angst.

The first is at http://tinyurl.com/o9yxp5s and it summarizes the results of a study on how Seattle and Denver losing a daily print newspaper lowered civic engagement in those communities. I have a daughter who works for the Seattle Times (the surviving print paper there), and a daughter who was an editor at the Rocky Mountain News when it was shuttered, so I was doubly engaged in this report. I was not surprised to find that the news for both cities was not good, at least in the short term.

The second item I came across was a Ted Talk, recommended by a speaker I heard who did a lunch talk for marketing professionals, which I attended almost accidentally. Well, it's a related Ted Talk to the one she recommended, but you know how things are on the web: one click lead to another...

Anyway, I checked out the video and found myself wondering how I had never run into this idea before, at least stated this way. Part of the speaker's premise was that we humans have a need, rooted in our very biology and brain structure, to connect with one another in person.

I made the leap to: if our communities get too big to have personal contact with everyone, perhaps at least reading the same text, sharing the same experience, might be the next best thing.

Bottom line: keep that newspaper, newsmagazine, magazine... whatever it is you call that printed publication that seems increasingly out of step with the rush of technology, the eye-popping videos on a phone or tablet.

That shared experience is worth keeping.