Archive for October, 2008
If we take ‘our age’ as being the past 30 years, its defining debates have been around the following subjects (results in brackets): capitalism v communism (knock-out victory to capitalism); East v West (East coming up strongly); rationalism v fundamentalism (rationalism winning not without fierce resistance); free markets v controlled economies (we thought free markets had triumphed eh??) and consumerism v slow/green/small/simple movements (more later).
When the histories get written by our great grandchildren I think it will be last debate that is seen to be the most significant. This is the underlying ebb and flow which really governs our lives. Our age is the one in which pockets of people first took to heart the conservationist gospel against which all else pales and whose long term effects supersede all others. In addition, and in my view even more powerfully, our age is the one in which nearly everyone experimented with the idea that sex and shopping could make you happy and found it severely wanting.
This is the philosophical reason why the current story of the markets is so exciting and important. It is much more than a story of human hardship, greedy bankers and panicked politicians although that in itself is a drama that commands attention. It is a story of the turning point in the most important debate of the past thirty years. In future our descendants may look back and say: “October 2008 is when the slow movement won”.
Our age is when the view that life’s main aim was consumption and the purchase of material possessions reached its widest acceptance. It was energetically encouraged by the champions of laissez-faire economics, continual growth and free markets. Against it, has been a growing coalition, united in opposition even though sharply divided on many key matters. This coalition includes conservationists, anti-capitalists, socialists and religious groups.
Even before October, any attentive observer of British life would have noted a steady efflorescence of this anti-consumerist front. But it was this month’s ungainly collapse of the free market economies of the West that really became the tipping point in the argument and the moment when the anti-consumerists gained the upper hand.
Where does anti-consumerism take us? The Future Foundation says we should expect more “smart boredom”. We should expect more log fires (boom time for chimney sweeps apparently); more cycles; more cooking at home; more scrapbooks; more knitting; more board games. Above all we should expect to see a hardening of consumer taste in favour of the sustainable, the rough-and-ready and the real. The highest mark of value? No longer Paris, London and New York but home-made.
Most fascinating of all to some of us is - what does this mean for journalism? Who is it bad for and who is it good for?
The bad news is that it is likely to be bad for the mainstream which currently gives most journalists their livelihood. Most of our mainstream media from ITV on one side to the Daily Mail on the other is both fascinated by consumerism and heavily dependent on it. Keeping up with the Joneses drives much of its content. And advertising, the lifeblood of consumerism, drives much of its revenue.
The pressure on this model is hardly new. Decline has been endemic for several years. But a widespread step change in sentiment such as the one that will follow on from the banking collapse of October 2008 will make this pressure immeasurably worse.
What sort of journalism will it be good for? Slow journalism, honest journalism, sincere journalism. One of the most thoughtful newspapermen I know predicts the rise of something like the Campaign For Real Journalism. By this I believe he means a pressure group that will fight for the right of journalists to spend enough time on a story to get somewhere near the truth of the matter, to do investigative work, to go off the beaten track and to polish the end result.
There has been a lot of interest in the US in a new website called ProPublica. This is an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest - supported by donations from several American foundations. British charity law is very different and I doubt the same site could flourish here but the need for it is parallel.
I also think the new zeitgeist will be good for home made journalism, for the individual with something to say and for the small group with a clearly defined purpose - as far as possible removed from the corporate structures and junk superficiality of the mass markets. It is precisely this trend that is giving such energy to journalism on the web. Of course it’s a truism now but no less worth remembering for that: anyone with a Word Press blog can now do their home made journalism and have access to a potential audience of trillions.
This week we at Shakeup tried to apply this thought to print. We tried to produce a prototype newspaper that was as “home made” as possible, without recourse to expensive presses or complex technologies. The result was The Manual, entirely hand-written and hand-drawn, distributed at certain tube stations on Monday morning, complete with ink splodges and errant lines where a hand had wobbled. (See the blog below for more).
We carried no advertising, used 100% recycled paper and printed on simple silk screen presses in a old workshop in Dalston. We consciously tried to convey something of the smell and feel of the materials that the newspaper was made of since we wanted people to keep it as an object of beauty rather than to discard it as junk.
We didn’t print that many copies but if we had printed 5,000 and had paid everyone involved at normal commercial rates we would have had to charge £3.50 an issue to break even.
I guess that means it isn’t a business. However, maybe that’s the unreconstructed mass market newspaperman in me. After all, £3.50 for a work of art that also happens to inform you about the world - that wouldn’t be a bad price.
October 14th, 2008
This is most of the team (above) working last night on producing the first hand-made newspaper in the UK. Every word and every image and every mark of any kind in The Manual was drawn by a team of volunteers - mostly illustrators. The printing was also by hand, silk screened at The Print Club in Dalston. Each copy of the paper has been numbered in a limited edition of around 100.
This one-off non-profit project was organised by Shakeup Media to make a point about the future of print. We hope to show that handmade qualities can transform newspapers from ‘junk’ to collectable. We also want to demonstrate the power of print as a medium by using ink and paper in a manner that emphasises their unique touch, smell and texture.
(We are using 100% recycled 170gsm B2 size sheets folded in half and Neptune water-based ink with 10% retarder).
The journalism in The Manual is a work in progress but we are aiming for a style that is more explanatory than simply factual - the motto of the paper is “Today Explained”. And of course, being only four pages long, the paper must be extremely selective about the events that it covers.
What do we want to achieve? In our wildest dreams we would find a sponsor that wanted to produce a paper like this regularly. Otherwise we are happy simply to have done it once and worked with so many talented and generous illustrators and printers.
The photographs here are all copyright of the award-winning Caroline Irby (www.carolineirby.com)
The Cast
Richard Addis
Ryan Bowman
Jackie Shorey
Beatrice Addis
Chrissie Abbott - illustrator (website)
Susie Q and the Owls - illustrator (website)
Fran - illustrator
Paco Garcia - illustrator (website)
John Sunyer - writer
Patrick Savile - printer (website)
Nicolai Sciater - printer (website)
Emily Evans - printer/calligrapher
Victoria Torrance - printer/calligrapher
Rachel Solnick - calligrapher (website)
Becca Davies - calligrapher
William Williamson - film
Caroline Irby - photographer (website)
Tom Barette
Fred - printer/Print Club owner (website)
Kate - printer/Print Club owner (website)
October 14th, 2008
Why is this banking disaster story so gripping?Personally, there are three possibilities. It might be because it is not just a disaster but a new beginning and therefore more interesting than misery. It might be that it is an anti-money story. By which I mean that in the overall balance of life, it delivers a long-overdue demotion to filthy lucre in favour of more important things: live events, family and ‘smart boredom’ as The Future Foundation calls it (i.e. knitting & crosswords). Or it might be that it has been powerfully good for newspapers.
If ‘good for’ is ambiguous, I mean it both ways - advantageous and improving. The story has been good for circulations since in confusing times people want to know what is going on. (Do not be surprised if the FT, for instance, is up 20% in September year on year when the ABCs come out on Friday). But it has also been good for print journalism. Why?
The answer is that the banking story, more than any other of the past 30 years, has been both electrifying and complex. The two do not often come together. Think 9/11 (electrifying but essentially not very complex) or Maastricht (complex but not completely electrifying). By contrast, the denouement in this drama of untrammelled market capitalism has delivered day after day of astonishing events that affect us all. It feels urgently important to try to understand them. In 14 days we have all had to learn some new terminology and some basic economics.
And it is this imperative, the impulsion to learn, that has been good for print. I have been conducting a personal media experiment by devouring everything I can on the financial crisis. Compared to print, radio and television have been woefully thin. There has been an adulatory fuss about Robert Peston but you could have listened to ten hours of him on the BBC and learned less than you would by reading one page of the FT.
It has been good for print because the British newspapers from the bottom up have had to take seriously something that the academics and poets (Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?- TS Eliot) have been saying for years: in highly developed media economies, it is not just ‘news’ that people want any more, it is understanding. I know that the smart people behind Thomson Reuters have ‘got’ this in a big way (”The end of think. The beginning of know”) even if they haven’t yet allowed it to make much difference to what they do.
It’s glorious to be, for instance, in Kampala where information is still largely only available in newspapers and they are as much a part of people’s lives as bread and water. But in London and Paris and New York those happy days are gone. No: what people want today is meaning (and fast). Delivering that is done partly through filtering and partly through interpretation. Does it mean loads of jobs for a new phalanx of journo-teachers, no longer tweed-jacketed and mortar-boarded but deeply learned and with the gift of communication? Actually, yes, it probably does.
The most successful titles in print already do this, namely The Week and The Economist. One does more filtering and the other more interpretation but they both get pretty close to the holy grail of making one feel in possession of a complete mental road map of current affairs.
Could websites do as well? Absolutely. But this type of work needs people. It can’t be done by algorithms. So far no-one has worked out how to pay for the necessary people with the relatively meagre income that web traffic produces. The Huffington Post? Not quite. But Tina Brown’s Daily Beast might do it. It looks very interesting. However it will have to make losses for a long time, which leaves the newspaper websites in pole position for the foreseeable future.
And the British newspapers (and their websites) have been doing an exceedingly good job. Take, for example, the day that the banking crisis story really went stratospheric - Monday September 29th when the bail-out package was dumped by the US congress. The story was not an easy one: there were no obvious photos, it led quickly into some fairly technical subject areas, it had a large ‘business’ element to it which meant that it had to be split between news pages and business pages and was tricky to package. And it was totally unexpected and broke in the (London) afternoon, leaving the papers with only a few hours to tear up their plans and start again.
Now look at the papers on the morning after. There can be no belittling the effort. Nine pages in the Guardian, ten in the Independent, eight (broadsheet, remember) in the Telegraph, seven in the Mail, thirteen (broadsheet) in the FT and a magnificent 14 in The Times. It amounts to over 80,000 words - a decent sized book - produced in four hours and packed with detail, history, analysis, opinion and colour.
Take another measure - not just at the sheer quantity of coverage but the degree of light that was shed on multilayered international events in a short time. If we accept that delivering understanding has become the hard currency of print, it was a golden day for what must still be the best national newspaper industry in the world.
The FT has always specialised in analysis (watch it flourish these days). So perhaps it should be no surprise that it rose so well to the occasion with a full deck of knowledgeable beaks, the best of whom were Andrew Hill, John Authors, Gillian Tett, Gideon Rachman, the Lex team and Michael Skapinker. Elsewhere on that Tuesday you could have been enlightened by Anatole Kaletsky, David Wighton, Valerie Grove and the best leader of the day in The Times. Or Alex Brunner and Peter Oborne in the Mail. Tracy Corrigan, Damian Pearce, Edmund Conway and Ambrose Evans-Pritchard were all excellent in the Telegraph. Even the traditionally non-business papers had some brilliant stuff: Sean O’Grady and Jeremy Warner in the Independent and George Monbiot , Ann Pettifer and Nils Pratley in The Guardian.
Prize for the highest wattage? Mike Skapinker in the FT. He first saw the 30 year pattern that everyone else has since pondered: 1978 to 2008 “Three decades of untrammelled free markets are over”. And he was wise and right to see the locus of business power shifting east. Above all, he was wise to see that New York and London will be back, with their advantages of language, law and brain power.
Print. Not dead yet.
October 7th, 2008
