Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

On the New York Times “City Room” blog yesterday, David Dunlap had a posting entitled “Coming to Newsstands Now: A New Look.” In the posting, Dunlap writes about how newsstands around the city (which he poetically describes as “a bit of ungainly but plainspoken street furniture”) are being redesigned by Grimshaw Architects, “one of the world’s leading design companies.” In an age of growing online consumption of not just news, but all kinds of entertainment (who needs The New York Post when you have Gawker?), having famous architects spend their time designing newsstands is like having leading record labels release eight-tracks. Because, in an increasingly digital world, an RSS reader is the new newsstand.

RSS readers allow people to easily find and cherry-pick the news that they want to read, thereby constructing their own publication. In fact, I find it interesting/silly that The Washington Post will put, at the top of the stories that appear on their website, where in the paper the story originally appeared (as if it makes any difference to me that something that was on the home page appeared on page B01 or C01 of the print edition). I wouldn’t care if it was on the very last page of the very last section of the paper; if it’s content I’m interested in, it’s going to be the first thing I read.

I was thinking this about when I read Joe Strupp’s article on the Editor & Publisher website entitled “’User’ Sites Choose Different News Than Mainstream Outlets.” In the article Strupp talks about how, according to a new survey, “New York Mainstream media outlets may not be offering up the stories online users most want to read.” Instead, “user-generated news sites like Yahoo give top billing to different stories than mainstream organizations.”

The story lists a number of surprising conclusions, among them that “online users gravitated toward different topics than those from traditional news outlets.” All of which goes to show that, when the New York Times claims that its paper contains “All the news that’s fit to print,” what it’s really saying is “All the news we feel like printing.” But Web 2.0 technology, and websites like Digg and Reddit, allow the users themselves to vote, endorse and share the stories that they’re interested in. The same way that on-demand television shattered prime time, the term “front page news” is now in for a bashing.

In Dunlap’s posting, he acknowledges this to a degree, asking in the end, “Perhaps more to the point, will [New Yorkers in three years] be going to newsstands at all?” My answer is, yes, of course, New Yorkers will continue going to newsstands, but the numbers will be way down from what they used to be. Or rather, they’ll be going to the newsstands for just gum and candy (and what architect in the world would like to spend their time designing a work of art for that?)