Print is dead, part 65,465,143

• Eric Alterman eulogizes the newspaper in The New Yorker.

Well, not really. But Alterman does make the good point that the collective nature of a newspaper -- its bringing-together of disparate topics on a daily basis -- is a unique element, one that's lost when RSS feeds make it possible to cherry-pick your topics of interest:

The transformation will also engender serious losses. By providing what Bill Keller, of the Times, calls the “serendipitous encounters that are hard to replicate in the quicker, reader-driven format of a Web site”—a difference that he compares to that “between a clock and a calendar”—newspapers have helped to define the meaning of America to its citizens. To choose one date at random, on the morning of Monday, February 11th, I picked up the paper-and-ink New York Times on my doorstep, and, in addition to the stories one could have found anywhere—Obama defeating Clinton again and the Bush Administration’s decision to seek the death penalty for six Guantánamo detainees—the front page featured a unique combination of articles, stories that might disappear from our collective consciousness were there no longer any institution to generate and publish them. These included a report from Nairobi, by Jeffrey Gettleman, on the effect of Kenya’s ethnic violence on the country’s middle class; a dispatch from Doha, by Tamar Lewin, on the growth of American university campuses in Qatar; and, in a scoop that was featured on the Huffington Post’s politics page and excited much of the blogosphere that day, a story, by Michael R. Gordon, about the existence of a study by the RAND Corporation which offered a harsh critique of the Bush Administration’s performance in Iraq. The juxtaposition of these disparate topics forms both a baseline of knowledge for the paper’s readers and a picture of the world they inhabit.

Shoring up our base

• David Kipen bemoans the dwindling amount of book coverage in newspapers at Salon.

More of the same drumbeating argument, with some interesting bits.

Instead, strong anecdotal evidence suggests that book reviews fall somewhere near the middle. So why don't editors feel as sentimental about them as they do about plenty of other stories that won't ever knock terrorist attacks or wardrobe malfunctions out of the top 10? For one thing, freelancers contribute most of the copy to newspaper book review sections, and freelancers cost a few extra bucks. For another, trying to publish a review of every halfway interesting new book each week is like trying to review every new video on YouTube. It's beyond hopeless. So why should we blame some harried arts editor for thinking, "That beat's uncoverable. Let's just give up and run sudoku-plus instead."

That editor might almost have a point, if book reviews and the people who write them weren't what biologists like to call an "indicator species." An indicator species is the newt or worm in an ecosystem that nobody much notices until it starts to disappear. And even then, who really misses another polliwog -- until six months later when, suddenly, even the buzzards are dead?

Like it or not, the indicator species for American daily journalism is the book review. Newspapers were cutting book coverage before the current flurry, among other places in Detroit, San Jose and Boston. Without exception, losing their book pages failed to stanch either reader loss or red ink. Were these papers already in trouble before they started cutting book coverage? Of course, but what did their publishers expect by further alienating people who like to read -- the one constituency no newspaper can survive without? Put another way, how can institutions that cover electoral politics be so deaf to every campaign's first commandment, namely, "Shore up your base"?

I wish there was some magic way we could get people to read more, but try to jam something down peoples' throats -- kids, especially -- and they will undoubtedly reject the idea more quickly. Kipen talks at length about the number of different organizations out there designed to increase awareness of the importance of reading, but he stumbles when he gets into hyperbolic doom-and-gloom predictions. Arguments that people read less than they ever have -- I've been hearing that all my life and I just don't think it holds much water. There are lots and lots of people out there with lots of books on their shelves. Still, he's right in that as a country we need to get it back into people's heads that it's cool to be smart and well-informed about as many different topics as possible, and that it's not cool to be a lazy, dumbass moron addicted to fast food and network television.

Dropping like flies

• The Wall Street Journal reports on the decreasing number of book sections in newspapers.

Egon Spengler said it back in 1984: "Print is dead."

In an era of targeted marketing, publishers say the best time to reach readers is when they are in the stores with money in their pockets looking to make an immediate purchase. But with a sea of titles in the stores -- the average 25,000-square-foot store in the Barnes & Noble Inc. chain now stocks between 125,000 and 150,000 titles -- the only way for publishers to stand out is to pay for real estate in the front and pile those books up high.

"You want to see your books in prominent places," says Tom Perry, associate publisher of Bertelsmann AG's Random House Publishing Group. "Such co-op advertising is where marketing dollars are going that might otherwise have been spent on advertising." However, Mr. Perry notes that Random House on occasion advertises in the New York Times Book Review when it is searching for what he described as a "traditional book buyer."

One publisher says that chain bookstores can charge $1 or more per book to stack titles in desirable locations, such as on a table at the entrance or in a display featuring new nonfiction titles.

Even those who say they still support book-section advertising say it's only effective as part of a larger marketing effort. Michael Pietsch, publisher of Lagardère SCA's Little, Brown imprint, says advertising in book reviews can help drive sales if the author is well-known and if it's done in conjunction with online campaigns.

From finding the news to having it given to you

• News reporters have a fraction of the access to today's front lines as they did in Vietnam, says the AP.

Obligatory smartass rejoinder: No shit, Sherlock.

The journalists recalled that soldiers in the field welcomed reporters, would transport them around the country and respected them for facing the hardships and dangers in battle zones.

"In Vietnam, if you had the courage and the stamina, you could go anywhere," said [George] Esper, who spent 10 years in Southeast Asia and wrote more words on the war than any other reporter. He retired from the AP in 2000.

But the media's freedom to cover the war had some lasting harm, including journalists killed on the battlefield. There also was resentment from the military establishment, which didn't always appreciate what was written, the journalists said.

A troubling topic, this one. It's certainly true that the government has clamped down on the media since the end of Vietnam, which has had the ripple effect of creating a press corps that is either unable or unwilling to ask the questions that need to be asked. Every administration since has used a cloak of Byzantine legalese to keep from having to answer anything resembling a direct question. At one point it was thought that the old blogosphere was going to be the solution to this, but, of course, the prevailing attitude has evolved into "bloggers don't do their research and they're not accountable to anyone except themselves, so they're even less reliable than the mainstream media." The Dubyah Administration has been exceptionally obsessed with secrecy (even going so far as to reclassify previously-declassified documents en masse), but it's just continuing a trend that began once those last choppers left the Saigon embassy in 1975.

I can almost understand the government wanting to limit access to war zones, but at the same time, journalists today ought not to be so easily intimidated. It's not that they're not doing their job -- look no further than reports deunking the claims of Saddam Hussein's WMDs, or Iraq's so-called involvement in the 9/11 attacks, and so on and so forth -- but they're being beat at their own game by getting led around by the nose by a government that's figured out how to wrap the media around its grimy fingers. It has nothing to do with partisan bickering between parties; it has everything to do with the government's skill at manipulation and the media's distressing blind faith in seemingly everything they're told.

Old school, new school

Two recent articles shed some light onto two much-discussed areas of the literary industry. The first was a Farhad Manjoo piece at Salon called “All the News Stuff That’s Fit to Print,” which discussed how newspapers are trying to keep up with the turning technological tide, starting with a paper target in the form of a twentysomething college student who, predictably, comes off as a bimbo:

Brown gets her news from three main sources, and each gives her a general impression of what's happening in the world. She watches "The Daily Show," which she says provides "a good grasp of what's going on." She occasionally reads the Sun-Times, Chicago's smaller competitor to the Tribune, which she likes for its size. And she frequently picks up RedEye, the free, daily commuter paper published by the Tribune and aimed at young people in Chicago.

Shaking your head at this kind of thing gets you nowhere. But, alas, newspapers have it in their head that the secret to financial success is capturing the attention of the 18-24 crowd, those fickle youngsters with lots of disposable income lying around, but they don’t seem to grasp that the advent of online communication has rendered their own product essentially extinct; by the time the printed edition hits the newsstands, its online counterpart always has more information to offer. Plus, there’s the whole notion that news has to be entertaining, which to me seems a contradiction in terms. Dumbing down the news and making it palatable to MTVites doesn’t do anyone any favors in the long run, especially when breathless tabloid reporting on celebrity escapades is seen as newsworthy.

Which is where the second article comes in. A Trevor Butterworth article at the Financial Times called “Time For The Last Post” discusses the burgeoning blogosphere, kicking off with an account of one of the strangest Vanity Fair photoshoots ever:

On a winter-cold morning last autumn, before the leaves could summon up the energy to burn and fall, the barbarians entered the gate. A group of feisty young writers, known only to millions of readers by their blog names - Gawker, Gizmodo, Wonkette and Defamer - were in a soigne studio in New York’s Chelsea district to be photographed for the February issue of Vanity Fair magazine. They represented the cream of Gawker Media - a mini-empire of clever, gossip-driven blogs launched in 2003 by Nick Denton, a former reporter for the Financial Times. But they were also emissaries from the blogging hordes, a raffish army of citizen journalists bent on overthrowing the old guard of the US media.

Tabloids are always going to be popular; everyone loves a star, but everyone loves watching a star fall even more. We’re quick to place whom we see as extraordinary on the pedestal of celebrity, but when, inevitably, someone steps out of their designated lane and acts like, you know, a regular human being, the tabloids are there to help the fall from grace along. Bloggers such as the above make this their stock in trade, and it’s fallacious to treat them as anything resembling serious journalists; popularity is not a yardstick to measure merit by. But Butterworth does go on to make a salient point:

But as with any revolution, we must ask whether we are being sold a naked emperor. Is blogging really an information revolution? Is it about to drive the mainstream news media into oblivion? Or is it just another crock of virtual gold - a meretricious equivalent of all those noisy internet start-ups that were going to build a brave “new economy” a few years ago? Shouldn’t we just be a tiny bit sceptical of another information revolution following on so fast from the last one - especially as this time round no one is even pretending to be getting rich? Isn’t the problem of the media right now that we barely have time to read a newspaper, let alone traverse the thoughts of a million bloggers?

He’s right; the sheer enormity of the information that’s available now makes most people’s brains short-circuit. But here’s the key: people seek out the information that’s important to them, whatever it is. This seeking of knowledge depends largely on your upbringing, your habits, and your conditioning. I grew up without the dubious benefit of ready access to cable television, which probably has a lot to do with my own partiality towards the written word, but I also grew up in a family that was comprised of college professors, lawyers and journalists; it was a family that was very conscious of the collision between politics, art and business. My own habits and tastes developed as a result of this atmosphere, so, people like me aren’t really the newspapers’ concern; it’s the people who grew up not reading, not talking about the world around them, and not having their thoughts and ideas discussed and challenged that are the ideal target. And unfortunately, simplistic and reductive techniques are usually the only way to reach a large amount of people.

According to Manjoo’s Salon piece, essentially the only thing keeping newspapers from putting serious effort into developing an online-only operation is the lack of a solid business model; money still has to be made. I don’t think the Internet will remain as free as it is now; online advertising, for example, has evolved from an occasional annoyance to an overwhelming eyesore to a ubiquitous, invisible standard, all within the space of a few years. The press was once seen as the people’s only voice; the so-called blogosphere is holding that mantle at the moment, but it’s not going to stay that way forever. In a capitalistic society, there’s no power greater than that of the bottom line.

Cartoonists under siege

The problem with fundamentalists is that they lack irony. Look no further than the current brouhaha across the pond over an editorial cartoon published in a Danish newspaper, which satirically depicts Mohammed with a bomb wrapped in his turban. It gets worse, though. Recently Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah maintained that “insults against Islam” would have stopped had the 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie been successfully carried out. Rushdie, you remember, penned a novel called The Satanic Verses, which the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini deemed blasphemous to the Islamic faith in general and the prophet Mohammed in particular. So the logic goes: someone disagrees, and has the temerity to say so? Kill the infidel!

That’s the problem with these people: there’s just no reasoning with them. Recently I read Under the Banner of Heaven, a fascinating book written by journalist Jon Krakauer about religiously-motivated murders within the Mormon community in the western US. Krakauer makes the important distinction that fundamentalists aren’t hampered by second thoughts, or even the framework of “belief”; to them, they don’t have beliefs, so much as they follow what they consider an incontrovertible truth. They don’t believe something; it just is that way, and if you can’t see it, too, then you’re an enemy. Period. It’s a disturbing thought to consider, especially when you turn on the television and see Governor Bush & Co. trumpeting, “If you’re not with us, you’re against us!”

In our neck of the woods, editorial cartoonist Doug Marlette recently told Editor & Publisher that he’s moving to the family-owned Tulsa (OK) World because “’I like the idea that there's a human aspect,’ said Marlette, especially given that ‘it's a harrowing time for political cartoonists’ as jobs disappear.” Human history is defined by the tug-of-war between differing belief structures; one rises in response to another. The arrogance that fundamentalist religious beliefs instill in distressingly large numbers of followers is an incredibly powerful force, and lately it seems as though the counterbalance is awfully late in swinging into action; more and more it appears that it’s increasingly dangerous to speak your mind anywhere. I wish I had a cute little wrap-up for this, but I don’t. This situation is getting increasingly insane, and generation upon generation of tribal warfare and religious persecution have made a solution harder and harder to grasp.

The wounded black-and-white elephant in the living room

• Jack Shafer might be serious about suggesting the CIA buy Knight-Ridder.

Sooner or later, the print industry is going to arrive at an impasse. With divisions like the Chicago Tribune’s City News Service closing, and Knight-Ridder on the block, news companies are going to have to face the fact that the business has gone digital. Printed editions of newspapers and magazines already seem prehistoric, especially in an age when anyone with access to a computer can read the newspaper online for free... and any newspaper from anywhere in the world, for that matter. Whether or not the bovine masses will actually do so is another topic entirely.

I wonder when the day will come when print editions of newspapers and magazines are viewed as a higher-end prop for the cultural intelligista. Consider that cover prices for most magazines worth their salt start at around $5; subscription rates make them a bit more affordable, but it’s still a waste of money when you can read an article online, print off your own copy and buy gas and food instead. Even if you factor in the printing costs, it’s still an awfully large margin. You’re not really paying for the writing anymore so much as you’re paying for the packaging and, more importantly, the ads, and frankly, I’d rather spend my money elsewhere than bankroll a perfume-ad photoshoot.

Short of a madman detonating an EMP in the Earth’s atmosphere (don’t think someone won’t try), digital technology, for all its shortcomings, is here to stay, and it would be in the print industry’s best interests to realize this and cut their losses while they can. I’m not into gloom-and-doom prognostications but I guarantee that a generation that grows up with instantaneous news delivery that’s cheap, if not free, will not really give much thought to printed editions, which, frankly, work better as doorstops. Online publications like Slate and Salon are the first step in the right direction, but print, with all its history and gravitas and importance, will trundle around like a wounded elephant until one well-placed shot brings it down.