Newspapers, Magazines and Books! Oh My!
I enjoyed this piece in Fortune about the future of books and newspapers and magazines. The writer, Josh Quittner, starts out with a nice little anecdote about how his 12-year-old recently subscribed to Vogue.
Each month Clem was excited when Vogue arrived. She’d rip into the issue and scamper up the stairs to her chambre à coucher, with enough enthusiasm to do Anna Wintour proud. But after digesting each issue, Clem would reappear with it hours later — only now a zillion Post-its jutted from its pages, stegosaurus-like.
Over time, one by one, those stegosauri began to stack up, spines out, in her closet. One day I decided to take a peek at the dinosaur graveyard to see what my daughter was tagging so furiously. It turned out that she was trying to annotate each issue, sorting the material by outfits, accessories, footwear, and other categories for later reference. I noticed that the more issues she tagged, the more frustrated she became. This was a lot of work. So why was she doing it?
“Don’t you get it?” my wife observed. “She’s trying to turn the magazine into a computer.”
Et voilà! Of course she was.
Here is the number one reason why newspapers and magazines will eventually die off: Kids growing up today are developing brains that are so in sync with digital technology that they’re not gathering the mental tools needed to operate in the non-digitized world that most adults can still remember. (My rough estimate is that most people born after 1990 cannot remember a world without the Internet or cell phones. I was born in 1980, and I have to really concentrate to recall what it was like to live sans Google or have boyfriends who never texted or even to answer a phone without Caller ID). I really believe that we are having all these lengthy debates about e-reading vs. paper reading only because we are aware that we are a generation that is straddling the gap between two eras.
We defend physical media because it is what we know. I’m glad we question this stuff, but I don’t think it’s a debate that will be had for many more years to come. As I see it, this isn’t really “good” or “bad” as much as it’s just a factor of the passage of time and the human desire to improve upon things. The only “bad” thing is that these so-called improvements are happening at a constantly accelerating at a pace that is super hard to deal with.
When it comes to the paper media death pool, I’d put my money on newspapers and magazines. Books, I think and hope, still have some good days ahead of them. I think that there are certain categories of books that will continue to find homes in stores and libraries and homes for years to come. When the information is important and useful and static, it’ll go into books and there will be kind librarians to oversee the treasures. If anything, I think they may become more expensive and better made. People will get the cheap-o quick reads on their e-readers but will buy and treasure the tomes that really mean something.
If printed newspapers and magazines are suffering, it’s likely because their online siblings are BETTER at getting the job done. I don’t like getting all my information on a screen — it was easier for me to keep on top of things when I physically had my bills in one place, photos in another place, music in yet another corner, etc—but news is always changing and the web trumps paper when it comes to tracking the state of the world from one minute to the next. At their best, web publications can get us information faster and from a larger variety of sources than their print relatives; they also can deliver the information in much more versatile ways. Of course, they’re also relatively cheap to produce and take less of a toll on the environment.
For me, the problem of non-paper media is that there is much choice. I have the same feeling about our current communication options. For example, I used to just pick up the phone and dial a friend if I felt like talking. Now I find myself first weighing the pros and cons of each form of being in contact (Tweet, Facebook, letter, IM, email, phone, text, face-to-face, Skype…). You now how much energy that kind of consideration takes? I’d rather not go there. The sad result is that the more cyber communication threads tying me to people I love, the more the idea of getting in touch stressing me out.
It’s a similar situation with news consumption. There wasn’t always a bottomless pit of information on every desktop. News had more of a shape to it—a beginning and an end—and was often largely local. It wasn’t always so easy to find out what was happening in another city or country or even another town.
Give me a magazine or a newspaper and I know how to consume it, one end to the other. But my brain wasn’t trained to organize information at this kind of pace, and so I’m constantly trying to figure out how to digest web content in a meaningful way that doesn’t result in either
a) skimming a million things and not digesting much
b) wasting my life by following every rabbit hole inside the rabbit hole
c) panicking at the number of unread stories in my RSS reader and then slamming shut the laptop
Some of the smartest journalists I know have set aside the whole paper/screen debate and instead are trying to figure out how to help readers become better news consumers. They’re also are trying to figure out which mediums works best for conveying which kind of story and message.
Their work is cut out for them.
