Michael Hirschorn has an interesting piece on the possibly-imminent death of the "doorstop" print edition of the New York Times in the Atlantic this month. He comes out at the end on the right side--hey it's not the end of the world, it's just a different world. But there's also some fogeyism. First the smart bits:
This is brilliant. I've been thinking it myself. I realize that the huge fees I got from MSM for OK-but-not-memorable pieces became a true market inefficiency in the internet age for several parties to the deal, chiefly the reader. My former wealth reflected captive advertisers and corporatized expression. The captured advertisers were used by print monopolies to subsidize a lot of the Right People, and the selection process was arbitrary and highly exclusive, even if it included me. I don't know how good that was for the world. Look: now you're getting my pearls for peanuts, and they're the true motions of my mind, not edited by some cya committee.
Smart. And Hirschorn reflects the fact that in a global world, the Times is offering a provincial brand. Which is one reason its irrelevance is growing.
Also true. Now here's the fogy bit:
I find this unpersuasive. There's more and better information available to people now than there ever was. Intelligent people will have to sort out their information as they always have. New institutions will arise just as old institutions arose (the New York Times, the late lamented New York Herald-Tribune, the New York Review of Books) and will be assessed, as human beings have always assessed their gruel: How good is it?
Let's write the word Iraq on the blackboard 100 times, or 1000. Elites got us into that war, with elite mechanisms, including the elite press. This is the present American tragedy. I don't think the internet would have given us Iraq. We would have heard from more bloggers over there, to begin with. For another thing, the internet is ultimately going to reform the Islamic world. (And maybe the Jewish world too). The new mechanisms are specially vulnerable, yes, but in the end they are a great leap forward. I'm not going to reverence journalistic training. It turns out that Millions of people, schooled
by email, know how to write and observe.
Here is the best analogy for the internet: Religious leader Jan Hus is burned at the stake in the 1400s for challenging Rome. Gutenberg then invents the printing press; religious texts are vastly democratized. Luther reforms Rome.
And that syllogism comes to you from Nabil al-Khowaiter, a Saudi Arabian, who I would not know if not for the damned internet.
'The captured advertisers were used by print monopolies to subsidize a lot of the Right People, and the selection process was arbitrary and highly exclusive, even if it included me. I don't know how good that was for the world. Look: now you're getting my pearls for peanuts, and they're the true motions of my mind, not edited by some cya committee.'
Yep, and that's what makes them pithy and candid and entertaining. Beats the living crap out of reading blowhard Tom Friedman boilerplate in the Times.
As a student, I found the editorial page to be the most interesting part of the newspaper. Today I never read MSM editorials. Blogs have made them obsolete with better, more fearless writing. Whereas newspapers, not wanting to offend advertisers, still tend to pull punches and pour on a superfluous, thick syrup of public-interest-flavored verbosity.
You are absolutely right. The blogs offer far "more fearless writing" than anything I ever see in the mainstream media. On those rare occasions when the LA Times actually agrees with me it it makes its points so obscurely that you need an advanced degree in Kremlinology to fully read between the lines.
Phil,
Aside from your commentary on the Middle East, this post on the power of the Internet and the imminent demise of the NYT print edition is one of your most insightful reflections yet. Please continue to develop this theme. It could be the elephant under the radar screen that is changing our world faster than we can write about that change.
Also, before you get too giddy about the potential good the Internet could do for humanity, remember that the bloody wars of the Protestant Reformation, cultural tribalism (Nationalism), and mass hysteria leading to innumerable small and big wars, were all made possible thanks to the "printed word". Dwell a bit on the potential horrors that evil blogger/hackers could wreak on our world today.
Mac, the difference is that google and hot links can take you in an instant to the opposing POV. The MSM hardly differs from its modern childhood when it blared all Huns ate babies.