February 2010

Recently, I posted a comment on my Facebook page about the predominance of social media for the transference of information. The response I got caused mixed feelings. From several friends whom I respect, I got the equivalent sentiment: “Print is dead.”

At first, this Nietzschean claim was no big deal. I chalked it up to our generation’s fetish for proclaiming the end of things and thought little more about it. Then I started to consider it more deeply. If they were right, which they may well be, does it matter for society, and how?

In many ways, it seems a natural evolution from paper to digital pages, which seems to be a good thing on a lot of levels. For one, it saves a lot of trees, and it dramatically reduces printing and shipping costs. Seems to me that both the eco-minded and the publishers would appreciate this.

Would it be so bad if, instead of having the paper dropped on your doorstep every morning, it was just downloaded to your e-book reader? Sure, some who reject technology in spite of themselves would resist, but there will always be some who battle change simply because it’s change of any kind. That, in itself, is not a good enough reason to hold back progress.

So, if the issue simply was the medium, we’d see a massive shift from physical print to digital format, and though some digital-only platforms would elbow their way into the market (see Wikipedia as a prime example), most would be able to adjust.

Instead, the move to digital is tolling the death knell for a staggering number of media outlets. Just last week, a magazine I once worked for as a columnist shuttered its shop, and I got an e-mail from another associate about the closure of the magazine he had edited for many years. He also noted in his e-mail that his was simply the latest among the 300 to 500 magazines a week closing their doors for good.

This doesn’t even begin to touch on the impact on dailies. Even our own local paper, The Pueblo Chieftain, is struggling to stay afloat. It’s cut back the size of both the paper and staff, and while some may see this as a good thing, a community that loses its producer of daily local news is poorer for that loss.

While Rome continues to burn, the one niche that strangely endures is the free tabloid, like P.U.L.P. Why is this? For one, its publishers reflect the ethos that has been embraced in the digital world: Information should be free. They also work with a much lower overhead, and, though I don’t get to look at the books of any papers, most of us at P.U.L.P. basically work for free.

If any of us had to make a living from the paper, it would close tomorrow, and advertising remains a challenge to maintain. This, more often than not, is the model for new media. But is it sustainable, and, perhaps more important, does it lend itself to the production of quality?

Hardly anyone seems to have trouble with the idea that most papers, books and magazines cost money.  We wouldn’t think of visiting a bookstore or newsstand and asking for the latest Newsweek without paying. But once that same information goes digital, most of us expect it to cost nothing. Some former employees of Denver’s folded daily, the Rocky Mountain News, tried to sell former print subscribers a digital edition. The effort failed.

So what? For every dead paper or magazine there’s a thousand bloggers and niche media outlets that fill the void. But that’s a little bit like everyone deciding tomorrow not to pay for healthcare any more, and letting it become an all-amateur industry.

Without any real revenue stream, it’s almost impossible to maintain a cadre of editors whose responsibilities range from figuring out which stories and viewpoints are not being covered to fact-checking and copy-editing. Another challenge is investigative journalism, which takes a lot of time, and sometimes no small amount of money, to do well. At P.U.L.P., we’ve longed to do more of this since the beginning, but its impossible to accomplish with an all-volunteer staff. Instead, we focus more on smaller features, reviews, columns and opinion pieces.

While it’s good to have point-of-view articles, it’s not the same as having a committed journalist spend a week or more rooting out the facts in a complex story. So, without this asset, readers are left to rummage through the mire of opinions to discern for themselves how much, if any, of what they read is actually true.

This leads us to a final concern: boutique consumerism. With so much information at our fingertips, we can customize a news world around ourselves that speaks specifically to the topics and points of view we want, and nothing else. Though this seems a great luxury, there’s danger in getting only information that further entrenches what we already believe, rather than challenging us with other perspectives.

The risk, then, is a brain-drain of cultural, critical thought, and a deeper polarization—as we’ve begun to see already—of increasingly louder and viscerally opposing sides.

It’s my hope—although I expect my friends are right about print being on its way out for the most part—that the pendulum will swing the other way. I hope that enough people will get fed up enough with one-sided, amateur rhetoric posing as peer-reviewed news and will see the value in financially supporting professional journalism, even in a digital-only format.

The alternative is that we fall in love with the egotistic phenomenon of being told what we want to hear, holding this as a premium over a more thoughtful portrayal of reality. If such a trend becomes the norm, it’s hard to say how far-reaching the effects will be.

But it won’t be pretty.

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