Opinion: Nothing beats the printed word

Thanks to the internet, news is being consumed more than ever before. Photo/Getty Images

You can't avoid the news these days.

Thanks to the internet, news is being consumed more than ever before.

It's not just in your mailboxes, on your television and playing in your car - it's in your hand 24/7 on news apps and social media.

Because news is now so easy to access, people who 20 years ago would have shuddered at the thought of trawling through pages filled with columns of printed words will quite happily click on an interesting link on a website.

A report released by Pew Research Centre last month found that globally, 86 per cent of people said they followed national news closely and 42 per cent said they get news on the internet at least once a day.

That's a lot of news readers and while more people are turning to the internet for their information, there will always be a solid group of people that like the feeling of paper between their hands, like the kinds of people who can never be converted to an e-reader but insist on being able to turn the pages of a good novel.

We met one of those people yesterday.

Eleven-year-old Kyra Batten avidly reads her local newspaper after school each day.

She loves to read the physical paper rather than scrolling through news online and she even enjoys filling out the puzzle pages.

Kyra came to the Bay of Plenty Times newsroom yesterday to met us all and find out how we put a paper together.

She is an example of the kind of reader newspapers depend on - the ones who want to know everything about what's going in their communities and like to peruse pages rather than swiping a finger across a glass screen.

Thanks Kyra for coming in and sharing your enthusiasm for the printed word.