The passing of the newspaper

Last night I finally seem to have severed my relationship with Twitter. It’s not that I had anything against Twitter (although it never did work on my phone despite its telling me that it was working); it’s just that I have no need for multiple social networks. For that matter, and as anyone who knows me will attest, I barely have need for even one social network. Facebook allows me to keep in touch with the minute handful of people I actually like keeping in touch with, and it allows me to keep an eye on everyone else whom I like keeping an eye on, plus it provides a handful of agreeable Scrabulous opponents, and that’s enough society for me, period. I realize this excludes me from potential Twitter mobs and the like, but I am willing to accept this loss. It won’t be the first time I missed out on some mob or other. My life has been like that as long as I can remember.

Meanwhile, back to that article on newspapers in the New Yorker. Here’s the deal. As you know, I am strongly committed to newspapers, and specifically the NY Times, as a general intellectual requirement for forensics. Aside from the purely interpretive events, all forensics participation can only be improved by a solid knowledge of current events. And as was noted in today’s Times (as well as the NYer mag article), the growing dearth of serious reviewers has its own special harms in the arts areas, so even interpers will be affected by lack of exposure to competent artistic criticism. It is impossible to ignore the fact that newspapers are dying, and that newspaper readership is dwindling. One can opine till the cows come home on the meaning of it all, and on the future, on the goals of the press in general and how they are or aren’t being met, but that is beyond my immediate concerns. My problem is that I have very clearly mandated newspaper reading as a requirement for debate, and I am probably deluding myself that this requirement is being followed, or perhaps that it is even possible to follow it. I’ve been working from some assumption that the paper is lying around, so pick it up and read it, you yabbo! Worst case scenario, go to the school library and read it.

I’ve been deluding myself.

Whether or not there are newspapers readily at hand, the benefits derived from newspapers remain desirable. First of all, of course, there’s the general knowledge of the news of the day, and the available depth one can traverse if one is so inclined. That is, if something important is happening, a good newspaper will offer hundreds or thousands of words on it, as compared to that same event being covered on television news, where if you get a hundred words, it’s a miracle. Secondly, there’s the op-ed material, where reliable sources opine on the events of the day, often corresponding to the topics of the moment (especially in PF). Thirdly, there’s the broadness of the coverage, ranging from politics to business to sports to entertainment to technology. Although papers do tend to organize along subject lines, nevertheless all the subject lines are in a given edition of the paper, and therefore readily accessible. One need have little or no interest in business and one can still read the main business page, in other words, and get something out of it. Fourth, there’s the genial serendipity of the process of reading a newspaper, where you come across something that you weren’t looking for that educates, entertains or enlightens you in ways you were not expecting. A well-edited newspaper deliberately includes such material, little treasures that help warrant the paper’s existence in the first place, the soft news that otherwise never be news at all, but deserves to be.

I am a big believer in a McLuhanesque concept of the medium determining the message. One could say that everything I’ve noted above is easily available online, but the information transmitted isn’t the same because the transmitting experience isn’t the same. Expanding the example, if we’re talking purely about a news event, watching it on TV is not the same as reading about it in a newspaper is not the same as reading about it on the internet is not the same as listening to it on the radio is not the same as reading about it in a magazine. What are the differences? Television provides an immediate you-are-there aspect to an event. You can see it happen. You can empathize. Television is great for certain things. How long did people stay glued to their television screens on 9/11? What was the effect of TV news on the Vietnam war? What was the effect of the televised videogame Gulf War? Why did John F. Kennedy win the debates against Richard M. Nixon on television and lose them on the radio? Television provides the easiest example of a medium’s effect on its message. You don’t have to go to journalism school to figure out what TV is good at and not good at. We live through it every day. We’re all experts at understanding it.

Newspapers are an entirely different business because the medium is entirely different. Reading is not the same as watching television, and reading a newspaper is specifically not like reading a book or a magazine. A newspaper is designed as a daily news delivery system with the most important news first, then the less important news. I’m going to stick with the Times henceforth, which is a radically different experience from the NY Daily News, which has a big headline and picture on the front page, as compared to the Times with, usually, half a dozen or so (what they consider) major stories on the front page. The editors of the Times have determined that these articles are the ones of note; inevitably there is so much to say about them that all you get on the front page is a headline, explaining the situation in as few words as possible, followed by the story, usually summarized and then elaborated on. If one were only reading the entire front page, one would nonetheless be reading a lot of words. And one would be reading about both national and international events, and perhaps also even local events (and, occasionally, on a slow news day, something that can only be referred to as human interest). That pool of front-page stories sets the discourse of what are presumably the major stories of the day. A story on the front page is considered to be more important than a story on page fifteen; a story placed on page fifteen, in newspaper terms, is considered "buried" on page fifteen. The context is clear. It may not be too much to suggest that the Times placing a story on page one, whatever that story may be, in fact makes that story important by that very placement (and makes another story less important by burying it). In any case, the front page is the one that claims our general interest, and satisfies our interest in general news. Everything beyond that is specific or secondary.

But reading a newspaper is not simply reading the first page, or it shouldn’t be just reading the first page. There’s a whole rest of the paper there, and that may be where the real disconnect of the newspaper and other media is found. First of all, there’s the simple number of stories in the Times on a given day. Dozens. Literally. To turn the pages of the newspaper, starting at the beginning, is to unfold the possibilities of an entire world. You can’t predict what is coming next, and you have no idea what you will find. Your eye glances at all the headlines, and you stop at the ones that catch your fancy and move along from the ones that don’t. During a presidential election there may be two or three pages of nothing but political news, which you’ll follow or not maybe based on your interest, or maybe based on something actually having happened recently worth knowing about. Again, you pick and choose. The op-ed pages offer articles both from one-time or occasional contributors and regular columnists. As I’ve said in the past, you could find a completely worked out argument for a live resolution here, if you’re lucky. You’ll find important voices commenting on important things. And once you get to know the columnists, you’ll find a source of well thought out opinions clearly explained on a regular basis. As mentioned above, it is also important to note that your experience of turning the pages of the newspaper will bring you stories about things beyond the basic “news.” There will be events in business, events in the arts, events in sports, inventions, science, travel, you name it. And again, the serendipity of it is a key message of the newspaper medium. If you’re interested in business, it’s no big deal to go straight to the business pages, but if you’re agnostic about business, but there’s an article on a company you’re interested in, be it Apple or Electronic Arts or Harvard (yeah, that’s a business) or some general piece on ethanol (do you have any idea what the shift from corn to soybeans means to the American economy, to farmers, to the high fructose people, to fossil fuels?), and you find something you weren’t expecting. And that, to me, is one of a newspaper’s greatest virtues, its ability to bring us something we weren’t expecting. Because a newspaper is a total package, covering everything, everything that happens is fair game for inclusion. Compare this to my attempting news gathering on the internet. On the web, I go searching for information. By definition, I have an idea what it is I am searching for. I can do my best to find what I’m not looking for, but let’s face it, planned serendipity is an oxymoron.

But the problem is, newspapers are dying. I can’t expect Sailors, or anyone, to really read the Times every day, regardless of whether or not I make it an assignment. They will get their news, whatever news they happen to get, however they decide to get it (if at all). To assume any real source other than the internet is self-defeating on my part (although I do recommend NPR, doubting of course that anyone ever really takes me up on it—given the choice of listening to NPR or listening to [insert name of contemporary performer I’ve never heard of and probably never want to hear of], NPR will lose out most of the time. So it goes).

So this is my challenge to myself. Accepting that newspapers are out, and believing that the information gleaned from newspapers, in its depth and variety and unpredictability, is important for forensicians, what do we do? What can we assign as a mental exercise program that will do the job that previously would have been done by newspapers?

That is going to be our goal for a while. I’d like to solve this problem over the summer. Feel free to help me out with it as we progress.