A newspaper is a daily morning event for people. People drink their morning tea or coffee holding a newspaper in their hands every day. They don’t care very much about the content of the newspaper. It’s just the event of holding and reading the newspaper every morning that matters to them. In this way, it is an environment in itself. It takes the reader to a world of information and stories. It can also be seen as an extension of the people as it is something they long for every day they wake up; without a newspaper, the day seems empty.
This is what McLuhan means by “the medium is the message”. The content in the newspaper has a certain meaning but just the act of reading a newspaper itself has a different message. Newspapers consist of a wide variety of articles and advertisements and entertainment columns and so on. All these have their own stories to tell, different every day. A newspaper subscriber never knows what’s about to come in the next paper, and mostly he will not be interested in all that, yet he subscribes to the paper and reads it every morning. This is what shows that just reading the newspaper is in itself an important event for him.
According to McLuhan’s classification of hot and cool medium, a newspaper is a hot medium. It provides readers with high definition information and does not require the participation of the reader in interpreting the message. Some papers include opinions columns which are open to interpretation/discussion which is “cool” but generally, it absorbs the concentration of the reader without making him/her think much about the event.
The visual sense is the most influenced sense while reading the newspaper as it involves reading text and seeing pictures. But it also affects our entire body in a way. It puts the body to a state of relax and rest without much movement. Our way of thinking tends to be in a very accepting