Column December 9th. The web won’t kill print.

Two zesty pieces of writing about media this week from America - both buzzing with flashy, larky intelligence that makes English journalism feel too much like mashed potato.First an elegant contribution to the “print is dead” discussion in the New York Times Magazine. It is by Virginia Heffernan, 39-year-old former “young-editor-to-watch” (Columbia Journalism Review), fact-checker at the New Yorker, editor at Slate, Harper’s, Talk and now, I think, online video critic for the New York Times Magazine.

Second a sizzling attack on the “feckless zombies” who run Big Media, posted on The Daily Beast by its editor and founder Tina Brown, former editor of Talk, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Tatler.

What Ms Heffernan says is that traditional media types are great at self-delusion. First they pretend that content is king and that others will take care of the delivery. When that doesn’t work they pretend that traditional (”classic”) forms will survive thanks to digital extensions (i.e. the video game will support the Bond movie). When that doesn’t work (why not just have the video game and not the movie?) they overwhelmingly fail to realise that the stuff everyone is reading on Twitter and so forth is radically different from the stuff they are producing for Random House or Vogue or CNN. She says the DNA of the way a magazine feature is written is deeply and irreversibly connected to the fact that it is for a magazine. It is nothing like the way you would write a piece for The Huffington Post. So traditional media people must either a) focus on what they do best and defend their dwindling audiences and die or b) loosen up! and develop some mental flexibility in order to make the best of the brave new world.

What Ms Brown says is that we are back in eighteenth century London where the old patrons of the arts were withdrawing from the scene and the middle classes had not yet started buying books and newspapers and buying theatre tickets in sufficient quantities to provide a living for those being dumped by their patrons. She’s happy enough because of course those middle classes came good. Very good. And she sees the same happening on the web sometime soon. Meanwhile her vitriol is directed at the drones who oversee and torment the people in media companies (like some that I encountered at IFRA I suppose). “There are floors of these creatures in any behemoth media company, buzzing about each day thwarting new ideas or, worse, having “transformative” ideas of their own when what is usually required is to revive, with a bit of steadfast conviction, the originating creative purpose of the enterprise”.

My advice is to take both these thoughts very seriously as we march towards the end of 2008, the last of twenty years when journalists have known relative plenty, settled lives and predictable careers. Mental flexibility, yes. And getting back to the original creative purpose of the enterprise, yes.

But in one important way both Brown and Heffernan are very probably wrong: they both seem to think that the future is exclusively on the web. This is now such a widespread prediction it is like the belief that Canute thought he was more powerful than the sea or that the Earl of Sandwich invented the sandwich i.e. it is easier to agree than disagree.

However it is far more likely that the web will leap forward in more pervasive and exciting ways than we can currently perceive and that the same will be true of old media such as movies, radio, magazines and newspapers. There will be huge shifts between them of course. There may be more people using the internet and fewer people reading newspapers. But it is madly improbable that the older genres will be wiped out by the new.

Why?

1. The idea that a new technology abolishes a previous role is much too simplistic. In the history of culture it has never happened that something has simply killed something else. Something has profoundly changed something else. The Pharaoh told Hermes that his new invention, writing, would kill off memory. In fact writing gave people more to remember. Frollo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame says that the alphabet will kill images, the printing press will kill the cathedral (ceci tuera cela), but both the cathedral and the image have flourished mightily since Gutenberg. The photograph was meant to kill painting but Daguerre made Impressionism possible. After the invention of Daguerre, painters no longer felt obliged to serve as mere craftsmen charged with reproducing reality. Nor did photography only encourage abstract painting. There is a whole tradition in modern painting that could not exist without the photographic model (e.g. Hopper).
2. Precisely because the DNA of the web is profoundly different from the DNA of print or film or radio it will not replace those things. If it were the same (cassette tape/CD for instance) one might predict a swap. But it is becoming clear that it is not the same at all. Indeed as the web develops it is getting more distinctly and uniquely itself.
3. There is so much more to do with print. (Movable type has only been around since 1439!) Take newspapers. They have not fundamentally changed for over fifty years. They have gently evolved in every way, especially design and printing but have never been subject to a truly radical reinvention. Thanks to the web this will now happen and newspapers will be better. Just one example: no need any longer for long pages of share prices and TV listings, or of classified ads and news roundups. Newspapers can concentrate on the great yawning appetite of our age - the quest for meaning.

Between Heffernan’s sclerotic journalists and Brown’s zombie managers we are not getting things right. We can only dimly see the outlines of the way the web will work and it will not be the way we think. And, scared, we have turned our backs on print without seeing the potential that remains.

It will all come right in the end but we are taking the long way round.

Parting thought from a T shirt company: These T-shirts are made on the shamble and by imperfect people. Expect smudges.

1 comment December 9th, 2008