More reasons I don’t sleep at night…
Posted: February 12, 2009 at 5:22
I think it’s officially safe to say that no one predicted the impact that the internet would have on the world. I remember when my family first got connected–using Prodigy, not AOL–and the internet seemed like nothing more than a pretty cool way to communicate with the world. I basically remember chat rooms and message boards (this was before sexual predators figured out how to use them, I think/hope) when I first got into it. As far as actual web pages, the two things that I can remember are The Barney Fun Page! and the absurd fad of “ate my balls” pages, which was first first introduction into the concept of “memes.” (I will point out that “ate my balls” jokes are still probably better than lolcats.)
I was a mere child at that point, so I can be excused for overlooking the potential of a way to reach billions of people. I just wanted to find the cheat codes for Doom. But I want to know how seemingly every major industry on the planet managed to miss the boat on this. Instead, it was left to the “amateurs,” who developed things like Napster (and its spawn), facebook (and its ilk), blogs (including things like Dailykos and Huffington Post) and every other technology that could have destabilized the foundations of major companies.
If I weren’t too lazy to do research, I could probably stretch this into a semi-coherent argument about how the internet is partially to blame for the entire current economic state (the crux of which would be that the glut of information on the web has undermined the need for intelligent investing). Instead, I’m going to focus on the journalism industry, because it’s what matters most to me.
At some point during the three years I spent getting my journalism degree, the industry suffered a stroke and is currently in a persistent vegitative state, waiting for the plug to be pulled. It’s kind of like the video for Metallica’s “One,” but less badass. The short reason why this happened is that people stopped reading newspapers because more information was available online. This means less circulation, which means less ad revenue. The rise of online classifieds (specifically craigslist) was a huge blow to local papers, which had previously been pretty safe thanks to the number of people wanting to sell cars or pets or what have you.
As I see it though, the real problem for newspapers is that the entire newspaper experience can more or less be reproduced online, but without all the inkstains and cumbersome shuffling of broadsheet pages. Newspapers have always more or less been about words on a page. There is relatively little in the way of design, because the focus of the paper is the news (novel concept, I know). So if you can read that news online without having to deal with the paper, why wouldn’t you?
Of course, every reputable newspaper now runs their own website in tandem with their print editions. That brings in some new problems. There’s a part of Drew Curtis’ It’s Not News, It’s Fark (which, in all seriousness, is one of the best books about the newspaper industry that I’ve ever read) where he explains that when a newspaper sells ads for their online edition, they’re at a disadvantage because there are tangible numbers for how many people actually respond to the ads (not as many as are usually expected), so the revenues go down. The logical alternative would be to sell subscriptions, but since there are other online-only publications that offer their content for free, the “papers” really can’t compete.
All of this is pretty basic stuff, and I’m probably rehashing things that you already know. But that’s all about newspapers, and I was a magazine journalism student, so I’m going to hold out hope that the magazines survive. I honestly think that they could too.
Like newspapers, most magazines post most of their content online (although a depressing percentage of the hits to this site were from people trying to find GQ’s Profile of Lil’ Wayne, which is not online). But reading a really good magazine article online sucks. Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has A Cold” is pretty much agreed to be the best profile ever written. It should be required reading for journalism students. But I’ve never finished it. I just can’t sit there and read a single column of text for that long. Magazines (good ones anyway) are about a balance of design and content. Everything about them is more in-depth than their newsprint bretheren, and every magazine (and every issue of every magazine) has a completely unique feel to it.
There is a character inherent to magazines that does not translate to the online medium, at least at present. I haven’t bought a major newspaper in a year or so, but I’ve bought dozens of magazines in that same time. I’ll keep reading them until they stop publishing them.
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