To hold it is to have in your hands a small, though very underappreciated, modern miracle. The very fact that it has made it on to the newsstand at all is a victory in itself. The rush to embrace all things digital has been dizzying yet, thankfully, reports of the death of the print newspaper have been greatly exaggerated. For now, at least.

Many readers still appreciate that the daily edition of a good newspaper (actually even a rather bad one) brings together a mind-boggling array of skills — news-gathering, fact-checking (yes, it sometimes still happens), writing, editing (that most undervalued of skills), photography, design, technical knowhow, not to mention what goes on in the sales and distribution departments. And that is nowhere near a comprehensive list.

If you want a reminder of what’s involved, go along to see The Post, Steven Spielberg’s telling of how the Washington Post upheld press freedom by publishing the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret study revealing how several US administrations cynically sent thousands of troops to Vietnam to fight a war they knew they could not win.

The action takes place in the 1970s, yet many of the skills that made a newspaper then are still relevant in the digital age, even if we are slow to admit it.

Tom Hanks plays Ben Bradlee, the Washington Post editor who would later expose Nixon in the Watergate scandal. Meryl Streep plays the twitchy, uncertain publisher Katharine Graham who stands up for her newsroom in a rather on-the-nose portrayal of a woman who finally comes into her own.

You’ll cheer for her, of course, and for the “truth troops” whom she is defending, but as newspapers films go, The Post is good, not brilliant unlike what is now being called its sequel, All the President’s Men.

For a film depiction of sheer journalistic pluck, it’s difficult to surpass His Girl Friday, the 1940s Howard Hawks screwball comedy in which Rosalind Russell plays a fast-talking ace reporter who is considering giving it all up to get married.

(Spoiler alert) The lure of the big scoop wins the day and the gal gets the job, the man (but not the one we think) and some of the best lines in cinema history. Now there’s a message from the 1940s that bears repeating today.

All the same, The Post and its message about the freedom of the (printed) press is pertinent too, particularly when social media can turn so-called news into an exercise in Chinese whispers.

Example: someone tweets a shocking news “fact”; someone else retweets it but with a mistake in it; the version with the mistake goes viral; someone corrects the mistaken version but inserts a different mistake; that version goes viral. And on it goes in a digital echo chamber with no beginning or end.

The Post has been hailed as a lesson in real journalism for these fake-news times. And it is, yet we don’t need to turn back the clock to find examples of very fine journalism. You need only look to another set of papers, the Panama Papers, for an example of how good old-fashioned digging revealed how the global elite use offshore accounts to conceal billions in assets.

I hope someone will eventually make a biopic of Gerard Ryle, the Tralee journalist who won numerous awards before going on to work at the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which broke the story.

But back to The Post. What it highlights most effectively is not so much the dangers of fake news, but what we might lose if the print newspaper disappeared for ever.

Many of the things that were everyday in the newsroom of the 1970s are already lost to us — typewriters, shorthand and the almost certain presence of a printing press on a newspaper’s premises.

While I personally miss the clackety-clack of a manual typewriter, its demise is unlikely to affect the freedom of the press, although typewriter-trained journos can wreak havoc on computers. They are the ones hammering the keyboard with the same brute force needed to make a sticky A leave an impression on paper. (Guilty, your honour).

The loss of shorthand and the threat to the physical printing press are much more serious.

Can anybody explain to me why shorthand is considered old-fashioned? There is no more effective and time-saving way of taking notes. All you need is a pen and paper and an ability to form Gregg’s or Pitman’s elegant loops. There’s no need to spend hours listening back to your phone app while casting around for a cable, a charger or a place to plug it in.

The bigger threat to news, however, is the loss of the printed word. When you pick up a newspaper and read an article, you know that you are reading the final version of a story — one that cannot be amended, updated or changed in any way.

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It is an unalterable signpost in time, down there in black and white, unlike its digital counterpart which can be changed, often without leaving a trace, with a simple click.

That click may well improve the copy, or correct it, but what you are getting on a digital platform is a constantly rolling piece of news, open to endless manipulation.

It is also more fleeting than we think. To quote another film, Bladerunner 2049, the digital data that we feared would follow us around for eternity turned out to be unreadable and inaccessible mere decades after it was keyed in.

The printed word, on the other hand, is much more likely to remain in all its dusty and mouldy glory. Another reason why we should never stop the press.