There's the Death of Print, and Then There's the Death of Print
Word is just out that Domino magazine is going out of business. That sucks. Domino was an unabashedly consumerist magazine (it was the home-design sister to shop-centric Lucky magazine), but it never felt like a glorified catalog; it had taste and an aesthetic and tight but well-thought-out features. (My favorite, well, is still around, for now.) This isn't a home-design blog, so I'll just leave it at: That sucks.
Word is also out today that the Washington Post's Book World is going out of existence as a standalone print section. That does not suck—despite the New York Times' claim that it means that "literary criticism is losing its profile in newspapers"—because Book World will continue to exist as a section of the online Post, and books coverage will continue in the Post.
I mention these two things together because they show the two different phenomena that people are too easily lumping together nowadays when they talk about "the death of [print/magazines/newspapers/books/etc.]."
The Domino case is actually the death of something. People losing jobs, articles that will no longer be written, etc. The Book World case is just about a transition in form. You may or may not have sentimental attachment to the feel of the physical section, but in terms of the expression of ideas it is no more momentous a change than, say, "Book World will be printed with a new soy-based ink."
I'm exaggerating, but just a little. Yes, I know that different media lend themselves to different kinds of journalism. I know that there's an issue of whether online media can make enough money to fund journalism in the long run, and what kind, and how. I even know that some people are attached to having a print newspaper to pass around the breakfast table.
But there's a difference between a journalistic voice actually disappearing and it simply moving to another platform. Put another way, there's a difference between the "newspaper" (to mean the newsgathering organization) and the "newspaper" (its product as realized on sheets of wood pulp). It's like the difference between a "church" (a congregation of worshippers) and a "church" (the physical building that houses them). The former is more important in both cases.
That's why it bothers me when people loosely talk about whether "newspapers" will be "dead" in five or ten years, without defining what they mean. If "The New York Times" disappeared tomorrow--in the sense that I no longer received a delivery of paper on my stoop every morning--I'd miss it, but I'd go online. If "The New York Times" as a news organization disappeared, that would be a much bigger, and far different, deal. (If an online-only newspaper were somehow worse, weaker, dumber than a print one, that would be bad—say if it had fewer resources to cover as much news—but you'd have to show me why that would be the case.)
I realize that communicating online is not exactly the same as communicating in print, for better or worse or neutral reasons. I've worked both in print and online—online first, actually, at Salon.com—so I don't see the point in romanticizing either. I think the people who evangelize online media and people who cling to printed paper miss the point: both are just ways of communicating, and both communicate genius and idiocy just as well.
That's why the end of Book World is not the end of Book World; nor is it the end of books; nor is it the end of the world. I'll miss Domino, though. What, am I supposed to start reading Elle Decor?
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If an online-only newspaper were somehow worse, weaker, dumber than a print one, that would be bad—say if it had fewer resources to cover as much news—but you'd have to show me why that would be the case.
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Barring a transformation into some kind of endowed nonprofit, how could that NOT be the case? My hometown paper, the Boston Globe, is a vastly inferior product compared to what it was just a few years ago, thanks to buyouts and staff reductions. The Times company (which owns the Globe) just released its fourth-quarter report, including the nice tidbit that its operating income is down close to 50 percent. I just don't see how online ad revenues will ever approach what advertisers once paid for print space. I mean, the Globe's web site traffic actually went DOWN since December of last year!
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I guess the problem, and it's a really sad one, is that people just aren't reading newspapers (either print or online) as much as they used to. This is of course the internet's fault -- not because the online version of the paper is worse than print, but because there are so many other options vying for people's attention. You could argue that the internet as a whole boasts greater news-gathering resources than any single organization ever could -- for example, I can certainly learn more in a half-hour of browsing newspapers from around the world than my grandfather could in a half-hour reading the Times. There's just as much news in Boston as there's ever been, with fewer and less experienced reporters trying to cover it. I don't know my city the way I did when the Globe was strong. It's like season five of The Wire. -
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I don't know if it's my age or cynicism speaking through this, but my general attitude is, "Seriously? This is a big deal?" (I'm referring to the Book World change. I'm definitely not a fan of people losing their jobs.) The only time I read the print newspaper is Sunday at my parents' house, because they get the paper Friday-Sunday. I read more news online, because I can jump story to story. Heck, I'm active in my local paper's website, which keeps me in touch with my community in a way reading a paper never could.
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darn, what will they send me in place of my Domino subscription, i already get Lucky... i will miss it.
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I guess the problem, and it's a really sad one, is that people just aren't reading newspapers (either print or online) as much as they used to. This is of course the internet's fault -- not because the online version of the paper is worse than print, but because there are so many other options vying for people's attention.
I disagree with this, at least in part. This is the same argument that network TV makes. "People aren't watching TV!" Yes, well, most of the content the networks put out is utter crap and then they wonder why we don't watch it. The same goes for most of the newspaper websites I've seen. They are poorly designed, ugly, and hard to navigate. It's like maybe they gave someone's nephew $100 to make them a website.
In that area, you're right - we do have the option of finding better quality, easier-on-the-eyes ways to get our news. If the news organizations behind these papers want to stay in business, they need to embrace the Internet and offer competitive, high quality content management systems instead of grudgingly putting up some poorly formatted content on cheaply made, garishly colored sites.
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[...] Stewart. Related stories: Do newspaper have a future? and Extra: Newspapers Aren’t Dead and There’s the death of print, and then there’s the death of print [...]
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You may only be upset about the disappearance of the magazine and not the transition of Book World, but the disappearance of one contributes to the other. They are both part of the same trend that is showing an exponential decline in the tangible printed word.
To be honest, either way, it sucks. Yes, technically, Book World is still, in some form, available. But a different format is quite a change, regardless of what you stated when you said, "I think the people who evangelize online media and people who cling to printed paper miss the point: both are just ways of communicating, and both communicate genius and idiocy just as well."
That's akin to saying "I think the people who love cats and who adore dogs miss the point: both are house pets that eat and poop."
I grew up with the internet. I blog almost daily, check facebook compulsively, and read CNN rather than watching it. And yet I realize that at some point, this departure from tangible print will have gone too far. Convenience and cost-cutting has its price on society. Will there come an apocalyptic day where we no longer buy art for our walls because we can just set it as our computer desktop? Maybe not, but this is the reality of the direction we are headed in. I may be an anachronism, but where are the handwritten letters, the pressed wedding invitations? We are losing something great.
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