The huge variety of papers available today is genuinely wonderful. That's the good news. The bad news is that to experience them, one needs to see and handle them. It is said that placing them in a frame behind glass or plexiglass renders much of this moot but that's not totally true. If you have a local store, go in and see if they have demo prints to look at and touch. If you have photo friends, look at and touch their work. I mention touch because I often make folios of 8-10 images, using Dane Creek Photography folders, a wonderful way to show your work and the viewers are also "touchers." Try not to get into the "paper of the week," as many of us did with developers in the film era. Try a paper; many manufacturers sell sample packs with a couple of sheets each of various papers. Make some prints, put them in mattes and put them where you can look at them for a week or two. Look at them in various lighting situations. Take it slow, don't try 14 new papers in a couple of days, you'll go crazy. Many of us have a matter and glossy paper we use for "work prints" and a paper we use for "finished" or "master" prints. You'll figure out what you like. Try to avoid reading descriptions of papers online, it's like the Steve Martin quote, "Talking about music is like dancing about architecture." Look at real data; Mark Segal has actually measured many papers and published the results. That will let you do a bit of objective evaluation but ultimately this is art and there are no wrong answers. Some papers will do better blacks than others, but unless one puts them next to one another, that can be hard to see. My usual matte paper, Moab Entrada Natural, doesn't measure well in the blacks but I rather like it. You might or might not.
Good luck in your quest; may you find the holy grail (paraphrasing Monty Python)
