Faceless in Arab
Monday is back to gym day where I normally listen to a podcast of CBC’s “The Best of Ideas”. I listen to a disproportionate fraction of CBC podcasts not because I think the Canadians have it right and we here in the Yankee republic have it wrong, just that I have not found any Amerikan podcasts good enough to take over the niche in the time environment.
It is also a matter of common knowledge to those few, those happy few, who regularly visit here that I am a bit critical of the media. Hence it will come as a bit of a surprise today, to these, at least, that I am going to say a few good things about a journalist. The podcast this morning was one from back at the end of August – I do tend to stockpile the things for lean periods when the casters go on holiday, said holidays being of excessive and indecent length. The subject was the presentation of the Dalton Camp lecture by Kenneth Whyte. [Link] Dalton Camp is a discorporated journalist who was evidently a kultur hero in Canada, Kenneth Whyte is the editor of a magazine – not one I read – and has recently published a book on William Randolph Hurst.
What impressed me with Whyte’s presentation was its candor and, to me, at least, accuracy. The latter is as subjective an assessment as the former since no data was offered. So at worst, Mr. Whyte entertains the same prejudices and observations as myself, except in greater depth, and at best he, and I, are accurate in our observations.
The core of Mr. Whyte’s discourse, or at least the part that I let filter through to my attention and consideration, may be paraphrased as vellum versus paper. I mention this because it is an often forgotten aspect of the previous information revolution, the one largely attributed to Gutenberg. What we tend to overlook is that that revolution was made possible by the inexpensive availability of paper. The availability of cheap printing would have not made the difference it did without cheap paper. So in a sense we may say that paper forced out vellum.
The media (as opposed to journalism) model of the Twentieth century is one where the bulk of the cost of media, mostly newspapers but including wireless and television as well, is bourne by advertisers rather than consumers. In the case of the electromagnetic transmission media, all of the cost is bourne by advertisers except for public media. What Mr. Whyte reminded me of, rather embarassingly since it is one of my favorite socio-economic models, is that this means the advertisers tell the media how to behave and that behavior is banal journalism so as not to distract the consumers from the propaganda being fed them from the advertisers. Thank you, Mr. Whyte.
He then went on to explain that the demise of newspapers flows from that banality in that it destroyed the loyalty of the readers. That in itself would not do in newspapers however, as evidenced by their survival through the Twentieth century. What ultimately destroys them is other, faster ways of getting the news. Certainly newspaper readership has declined in proportion to the proliferation of electromagnetic transmission. But what has accelerated this has been the internet, the paper as it were. And evidently this is a case of newspapers being rock, internet being paper.
Another thing Mr. Whyte mentioned was that one of reasons for failure, part of the banality, was that newspapers became faceless. I was struck with how accurate this is. Certainly the Huntsville Times is faceless to us outside the city limits of Huntsville, Nawth Alibam’s Shining City on the Hill. But I suspect that the Huntsville Times is faceless even inside the city limits. Not so the Arab Tribune. Except for the few who only sleep here and have no life in Arab, everyone knows of the Tribune. They know where its offices are, who at least some of the people are who write for it. In this a canny strategy becomes apparent.
But I am worried. The Tribune has begun to let slip that it already plans to discontinue its paper existence. Not a strange thing in this day, but seemingly a blow to destroy its deliberate association. Once the Tribune is only on the web will it too go away?
