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.

Entry Filed under: Advertising, Design, Media, Newspapers