It’s a Sunday morning, and my phone is face down on the charger in my bedroom while I am head down at the coffee table, and I left it there on purpose. Before me are the latest PRINTED issues of the Wall Street Journal, Architectural Digest, and Vogue. I’m reading, not monitoring, researching, or consuming content with a professional eye toward what’s working and what isn’t. I’m turning pages and noticing the way a full-bleed photograph with the model wearing something architectural and the shadow work running across the fabric is something no digital screen has ever rendered correctly. It’s richer and more considerate, like it was made to be seen exactly this way. I stayed there longer than I planned and my low-level anxiety, which hums at a fairly constant frequency on most days, slowly goes down.
The irony is not lost on me that I work in media and run a PR and digital marketing agency, and my phone is a professional instrument that, less frequently than it should, connects with family and friends. And yet, deliberately and increasingly, I am putting it down and picking up the printed words in front of me.
On any given weekday, I monitor social feeds for multiple clients, audit their competitors’ posts, research influencers, review social content calendars, write press releases, refine messaging, and develop strategic campaigns across channels that didn’t exist ten years ago. The scroll is professional, purposeful, and constant. By the time most people have finished their morning coffee, I have consumed more digital content than they will see in a full day.
I chose my career because I love media and I always have, but when your relationship with media is also your job, something shifts in a way that’s hard to articulate. The finger scroll is my go-to reflex, and even if I pick up my phone to see how my cousin’s European vacation is shaping up, I find myself analyzing a competitor’s caption and then down a rabbit hole of influencer research. I’ve noticed while reading articles on the screen, I’m also evaluating their SEO structure.
As an Xennial, the slice of a generation that remembers life before the internet but came of age professionally inside it, I still remember passing around Seventeen and Teen Vogue with my friends, dog-earing pages, cutting out pictures, and discussing which model’s hairstyle to take to the salon as “inspo”. Print media was communal and shared with friends, and I miss that.
I didn’t make a declaration. Instead, I just started buying it again. If you haven’t checked the local newsstand at your grocery store, it’s pretty much empty, so I Google searched subscriptions to the old favs and was immediately hit with “amazing offers”. Vogue, which I have had a complicated and devoted relationship with since I was fifteen years old, has made checking my physical home mailbox a bit more fun.
I’m opening pages from a real spine again. It smells printed and has some weight, it also doesn’t inflame the carpal tunnel in my fingers like scrolling Instagram does these days. I’ve noticed colors look different in print, and I don’t know why, but a photograph in Architectural Digest of a French settee juxtaposed against a contemporary Arizona desert home has a quality that my screen could never replicate. These layouts are intentional in a way I forgot about, every empty white space is like a punctuation mark, and I love to start with the “Letter from the Editor” because there is something reassuring to my nervous system, knowing this was written by a person who meant every sentence in a voice that is unmistakably theirs (and if it is AI, I don’t wanna know).
My re-established relationship with print is reminding me what intentional content actually looks like and almost recalibrating something within. And I am especially reminded that the brands we work with at Golden Arrow PR & Social deserve that same level of intention. That a pitch is a persuasive piece of writing, a social campaign is a creative act of art, and the words we put into the world on behalf of our clients should feel like they were written by a person who meant them. Could this be making me better at my job?
If you work in marketing, PR, social media, communications, or any profession that requires you to live inside the media landscape, here is a genuine recommendation. Pick up something that interested you before the media became your job, and let the words and colors surprise you. See if your nervous system responds differently to content that ends and doesn’t refresh, and if it does, pass it to a friend.
Natasha Nelson is the Co-Founder of Golden Arrow PR & Social Media, a boutique agency specializing in PR, social media, and digital marketing for medically regulated brands. Before Golden Arrow, she co-created Yogurtini® Self-Serve, a frozen yogurt franchise that grew to 29 locations before being acquired by Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory® in 2013.
Connect with Natasha Nelson on LinkedIn or visit goldenarrowpr.com
