Yesterday I read Richard Rodriguez's article about the “twilight of the American newspaper” in Harper’s. As a journalist (or is the correct term "content provider formerly known as journalist"?), it sent stabbing pain into my gut—and echoed many of my own worries, fears, and sentiments. How could such a lovely term as "twilight" be employed to euphemize--or is it euthanize?--an event once believed impossible: the loss of the Fourth Estate?Today, less than 13% of our American populace reads the newspaper.
Those under 30 believe that newspapers are sold as wrapping material for shotglasses on moving day. Yesterday a college-aged grocery store clerk attempted to charge me for both the newspaper and the weekend arts supplement because she had no idea that the latter was actually part of the daily paper. (And was quick to inform me that I must be mistaken!) When San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom was interviewed about the possibility that his city could soon be newspaperless, he shrugged, "People under 30 won't even notice." Since 1990, one-quarter of all newspaper jobs have disappeared. That would include mine. And those of all my new competitors for bartending jobs. A Website called www.newspaperdeathwatch.com documents the chilling proceedings, as a new clod of dirt gets shoveled over the coffin every day. Someone, please, send flowers!Ah, Harper’s! Venerably founded in 1850. The second-oldest continuously published monthly magazine in the US. A paragon of great reporting by distinguished writers covering in depth some of the most important ideas of the times. But, as with so many journalistic enterprises of the 19th century, we now must ask, Will you still be cranking out prose at the turn of the decade?
Article author Richard Rodriguez is, like myself, a proponent of geographical identity. In his article, he points to local papers as the original assemblers and disseminators of regional identity. Sort of like rainbarrel, catching the drips of our collective psyches.
Birth announcements, obituaries, local weather, classifieds, cultural doings, letters to the editor, events listings, editorials, business ads, Little League stats—the sum of our communities’ days that, when taken as a gestalt, can provide a good reading of the local temperature. And in plusher times, when cities were known to have 2 or even 3 daily papers, one could take the pulse of an entire substratum of the city—-their target audiences offering a wide-ranging sense of perspective. As Billy Joel once sang, “I need a little give and take: The New York Times and The Daily News.” And truly, a reader of NY's 3 papers would gain a diverse and somewhat balanced sense of who her neighbors were and what they were up to.But we do not inhabit our geography in the same way we used to. While once we could be counted on to dwell pretty specifically where our car was garaged at night, we have now become citizens of cyberspace. A place without a country. A place without a place. Content streams at us from every corner of the globe. Those of us wanting to extend the "New York state of mind" can tune in to WFMU and hear jazz and traffic reports for the Holland Tunnel. Others missing the sound of their native Portuguese can access more than 3,000 Portuguese radio stations with a few clicks. And is this a bad thing? I guess it depends on who you ask.
As Rodriguez puts it, “Our inclination has lead us to invent a digital cosmopolitanism that begins and ends with ‘I.’ Careening down Geary Boulevard on the 38 bus, I can talk to my dear Auntie in Delhi or I can view snapshots of my cousin’s Wedding in Recife or I can listen to girl punk from Glasgow. The cost of my cyber-urban experience is disconnection from body, from presence, from city.”It is difficult for me to let go of urban and cultural identities. Our world is richer for them. Without them, we get the Taco Bell-and-Motel-6 effect, where every city starts to look exactly like every other city, and you’d never know you were in Horse Shoe, North Carolina. And yet...the upside of the global village is that, when boundaries begin to melt, things like territorialism and blind patriotism and nationalism have nothing to land on. And thus, what may be next—no more wars? John Lennon’s “Imagine”? All this fence-trampling could be a good thing.
Like the Internet, a newspaper provides a window into the greater world. And prior to the Internet, it served as the most powerful vehicle for many in learning just what was going on, gaining perspective, sometimes offering immigrants a fast-track to assimilation into a new country and culture. But the difference between newspaper and Internet is that, when we sit down and read a newspaper, we are exposed to articles and arguments we might not otherwise seek out. Sure, one can do this by surfing the Web, but the experience is generated more by the user, rather than an editor. So while it may be ultimately more tailored to our interests, it can also become a somewhat closed loop if we read only within a tiny spectrum. A Celtic harpist might be able to find the most arcane facts about his art form and harp on that theme...but might not have the slightest idea about current events, other arts, who won the World Series, or that his favorite author had died that morning.But perhaps these are unnecessary facts. Perhaps even my dream of some semblance of “cultural literacy” is sadly Old Paradigm, and I should just fuhgeddaboudit.
Perhaps I should simply trust that curious people will always be curious about the world they inhabit, and the noncurious never have been and never will be, so who cares if they read a Barbarella blog till they bleed? But with the death of the newspaper dies a certain dream of a common language. If we all evolve into little splinters, each with our own areas of microspecialization, what do we talk about on the grocery line? Does this me-first society really need a vehicle to accentuate the differences among us? Or more a unifying thread?
The other, much descried issue at issue here is the democritization of both culture and arts criticism. As Rodriguez opines about newspaper loss, “We will not read about newlyweds. We will not read about the death of salesmen. We will not read about prize Holsteins or new novels. We are a nation dismantling the structures of intellectual property and all critical apparatus. We are without professional book reviewers and art critics and essays about what it might mean that our local newspaper has died. We are a nation of Amazon reader responses (Moby Dick is “not a really good piece of fiction”—Feb. 14, 2009, by Donald J. Bingle, Saint Charles, Ill.—two stars out of five.)”
Sure, anyone can express an opinion, and Rodriguez’s egregious example aside, I have read plenty of cogent, well-described, thorough, impassioned, and nicely worded reviews on Amazon. Not every member of the hoi-polloi is an imbecile. But Rodriguez’s gripe is a point well taken: critics have the education and discernment that comes after working for years in an art form, so that they can offer a generally more-informed view. Sometimes. Definitely not always. When I was a music critic, I spent much of the day, every day, listening to music, had studied music and music theory, and did many hours of in-depth research prior to writing articles. Thus, I was offering a much different perspective than a fan of John Mayer’s who “reviews” his album on Amazon because he loves his music and thinks Mayer can do no wrong. That’s not a critical review, that’s a plug.But the democritization of media is a mammoth topic about which I could author a lengthy book.
And with it come probably as many pros as cons. But this and economics are two of the key reasons that journalists have become obviated. Now all of us, with our digital cams, videocams, cell phone cams, blogs, etc., have the potential to write, photograph, film, and distribute our own work. Gone are the gatekeepers. Everyone is an artist! Everyone who can talk can talk on paper! We are all creative beings! It’s all good!Is it?
Well, no. A lot of it is merde.
As much I believe that people have the right to creative expression, not everyone is equally gifted or has equal training or skill. One of the problems with democritization is that we lose the ability to distinguish quality that has taken a lifetime to be able to produce. In short, we reduce our standards and settle for less. The playing field is way too level.
Another function that journalism has traditionally served is that, by upholding editorial standards and employing knowledgeable writers, they slogged through the crap so that the reader didn't have to. However, in the Age of DIY, someone else’s opinion seems to matter less. We’d rather wade through and surf the waves and audodidact ourselves to pieces rather than have some old journalist tell us that a piece of literature was actually more thoughtful and engaging than a YouTube video or a Facebook thread.
As Americans, we all know so much. No one knows more than us. About everything.
At least American hubris will survive the recession.
