Whatever happened to the "print" option on news sites?

May 1, 2018 10:38 AM

I've noticed that sometime in the last few years, the option to print out articles on news sites has slowly disappeared. I'm curious as to why this is (and when this happened).

It happened so gradually I didn't really notice, and as a capable GenX-er, I've made the transition to reading on my screens just fine. However, I have older relatives who haven't, as well as some who can't. This becomes an accessibility issue for them. I also have a family member who is newly incarcerated without access to internet -- He asked me to send him interesting articles through the mail, but that's when I discovered that it's near impossible to find a news site with a print option for their articles. I can usually get around this with tools like PrintFriendly, but it's made me curious about the why behind this.

Is this just an assumption that everyone just reads on their screens now? Or is there some technical, design, or usability reason for this?

posted by leticia to Computers & Internet (11 answers total)

Have you tried just using the browser's print function? I just tried it on nytimes.com and it automatically provided a print-friendly format in the print preview.

I think the technological change here is improved CSS that is aware of different media types, like print.
posted by He Is Only The Imposter at 10:48 AM on May 1, 2018 [9 favorites]

In most cases, actual print buttons have been phased out, as hitting 'Ctrl/Cmd + P' on all browsers will use the print stylesheet, if there is one, rather than a separate, dedicated printable page with a button.

I suspect they have been phased out because they're not used a huge amount and they probably affect site metrics (because people are going to the nice, clean, ad-free print version of the page to read it, instead of the dog's dinner that is most news site content pages if you don't have ad-blocking turned on).

If your relative has access to a tablet, you could queue articles up for them in Instapaper? That gets rid of a lot of the cruft and allows text resizing. You can also generate regular Kindle digests using Instapaper, which also allows text resizing.
posted by Happy Dave at 11:10 AM on May 1, 2018 [7 favorites]

As a product manager, I made decisions like this because 1) you can just hit "Control P" or find it on the browser and 2) metrics showed that users weren't clicking on the "print" feature as much as they used to, and we could use that space for other, more useful features.
posted by vivzan at 11:11 AM on May 1, 2018 [5 favorites]

Best answer: I've been involved in more than a couple redesigns where the print button was axed in favour of making a great print CSS file, and allowing users to use their native print functionality. Since it's also generally considered poor form to replicate browser functionality with a website button, there isn't much advantage to having one.
posted by Jairus at 11:11 AM on May 1, 2018 [4 favorites]

Over the last few years, any website worth its salt (and/or with the resources to do so) has been evolving with the assumption that more and more people are viewing the site on a mobile device rather than a desktop/laptop. The percentage of visitors viewing on any sort of desktop browser is rapidly declining, much less printing from a desktop. And most web designers are going to want to get rid of functionality that few users are using.
posted by lunasol at 1:16 PM on May 1, 2018

In addition to not being used much, having it means another test target to make sure your site looks good when a printing based style sheet is used. That's more work.
posted by mmascolino at 1:21 PM on May 1, 2018

Best answer: Web pages can be coded (well, CSS'd) so that the same HTML will change its presentation appropriately for a computer screen, tablet screen, phone screen, printed sheet of paper... you get the idea. Previously, web browsers did not support CSS well enough for this to be true, and so public websites -- which have to be coded to conform to a notional worst-case scenario, to the extent possible by the production budget -- commonly behaved as if your browser couldn't tell the difference between presentation type.

So a "print" button is ideally unnecessary these days because the web page will tell your computer what the printout should look like without you having to manually initiate it.
posted by ardgedee at 1:57 PM on May 1, 2018 [1 favorite]

If you use firefox, you will often see a page icon on the far right of the address bar. Hovering over it says "Enter Reader View". Reader view gives a print-friendly page without the ads and other cruft that often clutter up web pages.
posted by HiroProtagonist at 9:19 PM on May 1, 2018 [1 favorite]

I was also going to suggest reader view but then I remembered it doesn't work that great with some sites. Try using it in this very page to see what I mean (spoilers: comments are removed).
When it does work it's pretty great, though.
posted by Bangaioh at 9:22 AM on May 2, 2018

Response by poster: I was slow to get back to my question but the answers here help clear a lot up. I actually never use the native browser print option, because it was always so unpredictable whether things would format right in print format. The inconsistent results trained me right out of using it. :)

Reader view is great (I use it a lot myself), but it doesn't solve the problem of being able to walk away from the computer with the article in your hand (and then mail it to someone).

I knew there had to be some conscious choice behind removing the button. I figured the dog's dinner issue that Happy Dave mentioned was playing a role, but I had no idea that CSS print stylesheets had improved things. I'll start trying good ol' Ctrl-P more often.
posted by leticia at 11:37 AM on May 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Reader view... doesn't solve the problem of being able to walk away from the computer with the article in your hand

The point I was making [but didn't explicitly state] is that from Reader view you can File/Print or CTRL-P and get a better & more uncluttered printout of the text than you would normally get.
posted by HiroProtagonist at 7:40 PM on May 2, 2018