VIEWPOINT
Heather Mallick
Technology won't kill newspapers
Last Updated: Monday, June 22, 2009 | 8:03 AM ET
By Heather Mallick, special to CBC News
Will newspapers wither on the vine? Will they go the way of the passenger pigeon and the sturdy canvas tent?
(Ah, the brush of a bird's wing, the morning smell of a fungal yurt in Point Pelee! What simpletons we were, so easily pleased in those days of yore.)
Of course newspapers won't die. They are merely shape-shifting. We still have regular pigeons. We have tents made of polyester taffeta. Technology moves on but human nature doesn't change.
The newspaper, as a medium, surely won't die, but it will need to take on a different form in order to survive. (Elise Amendola/Associated Press) We will want the same things we have always wanted – the latest, the dirt, gleaming writing, destination columnists who boil it down/bristle/overshare/require bed rest and a doctor's care. We'll need pet videos and Man on the Street, PDFs of politicians' fraudulent expenses, what happened in the PM's childhood to make him that way, news on the planet hotting up, war in the Horn of Africa, who is Nunavut, what is an isotope, is our children learning, the Breaking Fear News, stories that let us mock the vanity of others as we squat and scratch ourselves, and tell us "if it rains nuclear waste, can we wash our dishes in it," etc.
Life fascinates. Newspapers die? Cheer up, it will never bloody happen.
I write as one who makes no distinction between online and paper newspapers and don't understand why advertisers do. (They still fear online. And advertising everywhere may not recover for years, but it will eventually recover and flow online.) "Newspaper" to me means "news site." We may say we love paper, but note that we spend our waking hours staring at glowing rectangles and complain when they go dark and silent. What is this false yearning for an inky past?
As for ads, it's the job of ad salespeople to explain to Banana Republic that they're better off buying space next to my column than personally emailing me breaking news about a satin dress that turns out to be only sold online in the continental USA. Yes, I eventually got my hot little hands on it, but you need more than will-o'-the-wisp customers like me. You need a broad base, i.e., newspaper/news site glancers. Fashion is visual; it's an industry built for online.
Newspapers forgot to court women readers, and we are the readers who buy things. Even in a recession I still shop but with a more skeptical eye. Advertisers need me desperately, and I only read online.
And they forgot about youth. Age is irrelevant in itself, but crucial in a newspaper. When you come away from a paper feeling elderly, you cancel your subscription. Many newspapers have that fatal odour of incontinence, and I do mean you, New York Times.
I saw the Daily Show's recent visit to the Times newsroom and shivered to see that Bill Keller, the human comma, was editor of that huge, overstaffed paper of once-great possibility. That meek, inarticulate, too-small-for-his-shirt man would be hard-pressed to cope with my local Beach Metro News. But he's a Times lifer.
Here's another harbinger of death for media that don't get it. The best pieces aren't by staffers but come from freelancers and wire services. It may be that newspapers/news sites can no longer attract the smartest people to work on them. If you're a fast, nerdy, relentlessly curious and ambitious young person, are you really headed for mainstream media?
But I've always had this theory about newsrooms: that it didn't matter if they were packed with human pencils. What counted was a core of smart, multi-talented, highly paid people. If you had them parked in the right spots, then a newsroom would run itself. My theory has been universally scoffed at; I still think I'm right.
We are told that advertisers won't pay for online. But industries must sell their products and that's where they'll have to go as the print versions of online disappear. Capitalism is built on the permanent (and possibly less attractive) aspects of human nature. I pondered this last night as I watched a TV ad for something I call Muffin in a Jar. You buy a plastic bottle filled with alleged flour, fake eggs, high-fructose corn syrup and nutraceuticals, add milk and shake. Pour the result in a pan, bake it and presto, home cookin'.
This ad made me feel physically sick; it was a food crime worse than Baconnaise. But the sheer gall of it fascinated me.
If marketers can invent this revolting product, devise an ad and hard-sell it to old media for profit, don't tell me you can't sell space on a news site. Yes, mainstream journalism is stale, dull, cowardly and over-processed, just like Muffin in a Jar. But look at Britain's Telegraph, a newspaper named after a dead technology and headed for landfill. It hired a new editor and took a risk that other papers declined. It bought a stolen computer file of British MPs' shameful hog-like expense claims. The Telegraph newspaper/news site brought down a diseased political structure if not yet an actual government, and incidentally a paper was saved.
The Telegraph site, beautifully designed and organized and highly visual, is trimmed down. It will never be the Guardian, which is all-encompassing and rippling with new technology for readers. But I now read it online every day, as I do The Onion, Salon, LRB and 20 other websites. Why? They're must-reads.
Here's the rule: All great newspapers/news sites offer something that readers can't get anywhere else and feel they must have.
The customers will come, often sooner than the advertisers.
The problem of the survival of written media, as opposed to TV and radio, has been skewed and wrongly presented. Just as in the case of an individual employee, if you make yourself indispensable you will prosper. It's not rocket science, it's not even muffins, it's just the way things work.
