Page 10 - Print21 Magazine Jan-Feb 21

Leading Article
There is the news... on your screen
It’s never too late to remember that new media never – well, rarely – kills old media entirely. Printed newspapers have struggled against a succession of competitors in the past hundred years. They’ve survived radio, newsreels, and television. Now they face their biggest existential threat, the internet; specifically Facebook, Twitter and Google.
Sometime in the mid-20th century we last saw the iconic scenes of newsboys rushing through city streets carrying bundles of newspapers while shouting
“Extra! Extra! Read all about it.” People leaving offices queued to read the latest happenings of war, depression, and political change. At home they huddled around the radio to listen to the voices of authority.
The arrival and immediacy of television changed all that. People in their homes
could watch the Queen being crowned,
the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas, Neil Armstrong’s fi st steps on the moon, and Gough Whitlam warning, “no one will save the Governor-General.”
Combined with the primacy of cinema as mass entertainment, it was the end of the Guttenberg parenthesis, an era that began with the fi st printed text in the 15th century. Since then print as a form of communication, especially newspapers, has been in decline.
Now the survival of newspapers in printed form is under existential threat. Political turmoil in Washington DC, along with the Covid pandemic, engendered a massive spike in media consumption. Trump’s outrages and the Covid warnings from premiers became required viewing. It was visceral, immediate, television that left newspapers, struggling to keep up.
Newspapers could survive the loss of their utility as news sources, but they are in dire straits as Facebook, Twitter and Google hoover up the advertising dollars that are the lifeblood of print media. It’s easy to forget that classified advertisements were on the front page of many newspapers for much of the last century. That revenue, the old Fairfax ‘rivers of gold,’ has migrated to the internet, leaving newspapers to languish in the precarious doldrums of ‘legacy media’.
We’ve entered an immersive news cycle where people are online most of the time, checking on the latest political outrage or the progress of Covid, a bushfi e that may be close, or even what their friends are eating. Working from home has made online media consumption second nature. Anyone with teenage children knows we’ve already lost
a whole generation to their screens. For some it’s a harmless diversion, for others it’s creating a state of ever-present anxiety, emergency and distraction.
Newspapers try to keep up but they can’t compete with the earnest faces and dead-eyed propagandists on the channels with their instant commentary 24/7. Over Christmas, newspapers, at least here in Sydney, seemed to have almost given up entirely, publishing ever more skimpy collections of printed pages, their columnists off n an old-fashioned
holiday. And who can blame them?
I’m a newspaper tragic from way back, but
even I gave up on them during the break. I began to recognise their sources of news and information from my own web searches. If all they were doing was trawling the internet, then I don’t need their intermediation.
Th New York Times and The uardian
are among those putting up a fight for the
old titles, even as they abandon their print editions in favour of online. I subscribe to Th Guardian and Crikey, along with a number of smaller online news sites. Anyone who values real news should to do the same. The big city newsrooms will never return but independent fact-checked news is a worthwhile public utility.
So to finish, t is with some pleasure I can report spotting only one Kindle tablet on
the beach this summer. Printed books and magazines seem preferred, even by the young. It encourages me to believe that print is not dead as a means of communication, it’s just moving along to where it is most appreciated. No longer in the thick of breaking news, it is recolonising the minds of those reading for pleasure and quiet instruction.
In between checking the latest tweets and updates on their phones, of course.
Patrick Howard
— Editor-at-large
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10 Print21 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021
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