Two weekends ago, I sat down to start watching Peacock’s new sitcom show, “The Paper.”

I hadn’t heard that much about “The Paper” before its release, but the premise excited me; it was created by the same team behind the smash-hit “The Office” and shot the same way, but at a local newspaper in Ohio rather than a paper company in Pennsylvania. I expected to laugh, and trust me, I did — but what surprised me was how, seconds into episode two, I found myself brought to tears.

“The Paper” centers on a dying local newspaper called “The Toledo Truth Teller” that gets a bright-eyed and passionate new editor-in-chief, Ned Sampson.

The quote from Sampson that brought me to tears came when he was examining a vintage typewriter and a stack of historic newspapers hung on the walls. “Print is permanent,” Sampson says to the camera. “It’s like true love. That’s why it’s so important to get my first issue right.”

It’s become one of my favorite lines from TV, ever, because it is exactly how I feel as the editor-in-chief of a newspaper that still has a physical print paper.

My parents have a photo of me grinning from ear to ear, holding my first Collegian print edition as editor-in-chief: the move-in edition from 2023. And just like Sampson, print had been my first and truest love since I was a little kid.

“Print makes people uncomfortable when it’s done right.”

I often walk through the Lory Student Center and close my eyes, imagining what life would have been like before the proliferation of cellphones — students collecting copies of newspapers on campus instead of refreshing phones for updates.

The statistics around the future of print media aren’t promising, that is for sure. But in the face of record-low statistics around the trust in media, print is the only thing that remains to protect the democracy of trust in news.

According to a 2024 poll from Gallup, only 31% of Americans reported having a “great deal” of trust in the media, which is at an all-time low across all demographics.

Don’t get me wrong: We all love getting information in quick bites on our phones, especially social media. But the United States remains a statistical outlier for public trust and belief that social media is a catalyst for good.

According to the Pew Research Center, 64% of respondents in the U.S. believe social media has been more bad than good for democracy. The same poll reported 79% of respondents in the U.S believe that social media has made people more divided in their political opinions — the most out of any country surveyed. The U.S. responded the highest, with 69% of poll respondents reporting that social media has made people less civil in discussing politics.

In a world where information can be posted and spread in the span of two seconds — and often leads to greater division — what is the cure?

The educational value of print is critical for young journalists and those engaging with journalism deliberatively. Our print product goes through about seven rounds of copy, fact and format checks — three on the digital copy of an article, two on printed out page mockups and then two rounds of final management checks.

Furthermore, our paper is put to bed, or turned into the printer, at 10 p.m. on Tuesday nights and doesn’t land on stands until Thursday mornings. It teaches accountability and certainty.

In a world of rampant mistrust, a mistake online can be fixed with a simple press of a button. But a mistake in print, much like the enduring legacy of print, is permanent. It’s unacceptable.

You can’t hold someone accountable when something can be easily deleted; It’s something we know all too well here at The Collegian. Back in 2019, racks of newspapers reporting unfavorably on the Associated Students of Colorado State University went missing and were found in the trash.

Just last year, when our article on drugging incidents in fraternities was published, the stack of papers that sits outside our newsroom went missing. Myself and a few members of the staff found the newspapers in the trash can by the Career Center, and it rattled me.

Print makes people uncomfortable when it’s done right. It provides a historical record, and who knows how supported or secure a history stored on the internet will prove to be? How are we supposed to learn from our past, prevent it from being our present and safeguard our future if information available to us is biased, skewed and deletable?

We love our website and spent months last year going through a re-design to make it more accessible and visually appealing. We take great pride in being recently Meta Verified on social media and apply the same standards of journalistic ethics to all of our platforms.

But The Collegian was a print newspaper first, and it remains our mainstay medium.

Last week, CSU Athletics handed out copies of our print paper to students in the student section of a home volleyball game to hold up as a distraction visual during opposing lineups, and something beautiful happened: People started to read.

Frequent and loyal readers might have noticed the shrinking size of The Collegian recently or the reduced number of copies per stand. We encourage you, loyal readers, to continue to pick up copies in print.

If you are a local business considering advertising in print, please read this and know that this paper still has some life in her. We’re expanding our work with Athletics to bring more copies to home games. We are collaborating with RamEvents and other campus organizations to bring The Collegian to even more students.

You have my consistent commitment as editor-in-chief to uphold the value of journalism in this democracy we all live in, and that includes maintaining the value and education of print media to rebuild trust.

Allie Seibel, editor-in-chief

Reach Allie Seibel at letters@collegian.com or on social media @RMCollegian.