Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

The other day, while researching restaurants on the New York City Search website, I noticed a trio of strange looking heads looming in a banner ad at the top of the page. When I looked closer, I saw that it was an ad for the Newspaper Association of America. I’ve been aware of the NAA for a while, and have blogged in the past about their efforts to convince advertisers that print (especially newsprint) is not dead. So, curious, I clicked on the ad and was brought to the NAA website. Once there I was presented with a ghastly graphic of a newspaper-reading hydra (pictured above). Once I recovered from the initial shock, I then tried to figure out what this ugly illustration meant, and couldn’t really figure it out.

The Newspaper Association of America’s tagline is “Newspaper. The multi-medium,” so I suppose the three-heads could come out of the fact that the newspaper’s a “multi-medium.” But if that’s the case, shouldn’t the paper be doing three things, instead of the human? (Also, it seems odd that the three heads seem unrelated; in fact, one of them appears to be Ed Grimley.)

What’s also silly is that the headline of the newspaper (cleverly titled The Newspaper, by the way) screams “Information age is here!!” Because, really, most newspapers worth their weight in pulp love to load their banner headlines with multiple exclamation points (even the end of the second World War only warranted one). What I think the headline should really be is “World Attacked by Three-Headed Four-Armed Mutants Who Like to Read Newspapers.”

The copy in the ad mentioned that, while people never agree on anything, they can at least agree that newspapers are a great thing. And since two of the creature’s four hands seem to be trying to make a point, I guess the graphic implies that, while the various personalities pictured don’t agree on a point of view, they’re at least agreeing to read a newspaper. But even that idea doesn’t make much sense. Besides, wouldn’t the NAA want each of the these heads to have their own paper? (It would triple sales!) Anyway, this just feels like another misguided attempt by the newspaper industry to remain relevant in a digital world.

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?)

The Wall Street Journal last week had a story by Emily Steel entitled “Newspapers’ Ad Sales Show Accelerating Drop.” The article is pretty much the usual newspapers-are-in-trouble story, with Steel writing that “The newspaper industry has been suffering from slow growth for years, of course, after decades of declining readership. In the past couple of years, though, competition from the Internet — big portals as well as free-classified Web sites such as Craigslist — and other media has transformed anemic growth into slipping revenue.” A chart accompanying the story (pictured above) shows the “inky depths” that newspaper revenue has sunk to. (While the chart’s information is relevant and informative, I also really love the phrase “Inky depths”; it could be a great band name or, at the very least, a White Stripes record).

Steel goes on to say that “publishers are putting initiatives in place to generate a larger portion of ad dollars through the Web. Still, analysts say that growth in Web revenue is beginning to slow and isn’t enough to offset the decline in print.” Which is another way of saying that the newspaper industry, after resisting change for so long — and trying desperately to hang onto both its product and its audience — is now trying to change themselves and their business model. As Steel writes, “The decline, which has sent newspaper stocks into a tailspin, has prompted restructuring and consolidation.” However, it just might be too little, too late. Recent downward trends don’t show any sign of reversing themselves, and new consumer traits — such as going to Craiglist instead of the Classified section — are hardening into habit. The same way that music turned the digital corner, never to go back, newspapers are now heading in a similar direction.

Jon Fine, writing on the Business Week website in an essay entitled “When Do You Stop The Presses?” asks a hypothetical question: “Which major American newspaper should be the first to throw up its hands and stop publishing a print product?” (I assume the question is hypothetical; who knows, maybe somebody asked him.) His question arises from the current state of the newspaper industry, which has taken numerous hits due to the Internet. Writes Fine: “This could be the worst year for newspapers since the Great Depression. The double-digit revenue declines long forecast by doomsters have arrived. While nearly all the major papers still post profits, albeit smaller than before, a few prominent ones are losing boatloads.”

Because of this, Fine thinks that enough is enough and — with no upward trend in sight — at least a couple of major American newspapers (“not today, but within the next 18 or 24 months”) should cease printing a physical edition. His prime candidate for printhanasia? The San Francisco Chronicle. Why? Fine thinks that Chronicle’s website, sfgate.com, would be better served if it didn’t have the print counterpart. “With [an] unassailable market position, excellent editorial, and massive traffic—[the website] will be worth more as a solo digital play than attached to a print newspaper.”

Of course, in the magazine world, many media companies already have killed the magazine but kept the website. (However, last week Jane Magazine — aimed at young women — was killed all together, both the print edition and the website.) But this model, in place for the past few years in terms of magazines and some smaller publications, may now be spreading to the world of newspapers. Such moves would prove that, in the “print is dead” debate, printers have the most to fear. After all, Fine and others aren’t saying that newspapers, magazines or books should go away. Instead, what’s happening is that the physical products which are too costly to produce, and some times difficult for people to obtain, should be killed off in favor of less expensive, more interactive websites.

Following up on last week’s post about how the upcoming NEA study will show — despite everyone being, er, wild about Harry Potter — that kids aren’t reading more, The New York Times today reports that apathy in terms of teen reading isn’t restricted to just books. Teenagers aren’t reading newspapers, either. Juston Jones, in a story entitled “Young Adults Are Giving Newspapers Scant Notice,” writes that “With the United States military fighting a protracted war in Iraq and a wide-open presidential campaign already making headlines daily, Americans of all ages are interested in current affairs and are consuming news like never before, right? Not so, especially not teenagers and young adults, according to a report released last week…”

The report, entitled “Young People and News” (click here for a PDF) was “based on a national sample of 1,800 Americans that included teenagers, young adults aged 18 to 30 and older adults.” What the study found (among other things) was that “only 16 percent of the young adults surveyed aged 18 to 30 said that they read a newspaper every day and 9 percent of teenagers said that they did. That compared with 35 percent of adults over 30. Furthermore, despite the popular belief that young people are flocking to the Internet, the survey found that teenagers and young adults were twice as likely to get daily news from television than from the Web.”

Of course, the fact that teens get their news from TV doesn’t mean they’re not flocking to the Web; it’s now the place where they spend most of their time. It shows that — while they’re online — news is not something they care about or seek out. Instead, they’re spending hours upon hours on MySpace, YouTube and Facebook. Towards the end of the article, Thomas Patterson, “a professor of government and the press at Harvard who conducted the survey” says “My sense is that, like it or not, the future of news is going to be in the electronic media, but we don’t really know what that form is going to look like.” So if the future of news is going to be in the “electronic media,” I think that many other areas of publishing — including magazines and books — will be similarly digital. And if it’s not, we just might lose an entire generation of readers.

Annalee Newitz had an essay last week in the San Francisco Bay Guardian entitled “The future of paper.” Newitz begins her essay by painting what many in journalism and publishing see as a doomsday scenario: “Twenty years from now, paper will no longer be a tool for mass communication. Instead it will be a substance akin to plastic, a mere fabricated building material with industrial and consumer applications.” But while Newitz doesn’t think this will come to pass, she acknowledges that “Print communication is dying out, and with it goes the paper industry. Over the past few months, I’ve witnessed the two biggest daily papers in my area, the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News, announce budget cuts that will slash their staffs by one-quarter.” Newitz then charts her own evolution through words in the past couple of years, showing how she has segued from a physical to virtual product: “I’ve gone from a print zine to an online zine to a weekly newspaper to print magazines to running a blog.”

Finally, though, Newitz captures a slice of the current situation perfectly, summing up certain communities and companies who are unreasoningly behind the drive to save paper instead of writers: “I live in a world where corporations care more about the future of paper than the futures of people who have made their living turning paper into a massive network of vital, important communications. This is not how technological change should work. You cannot discard a person the way you discard a market niche.” Newitz here is paraphrasing Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman: “You can’t eat an orange and then throw the peel away — a man is not a piece of fruit!” God help writers when they start getting compared to Loman, the starry-eyed dreamer whose life ended in tragedy because he was too stubborn to give up his dream. But in terms of an industry in which many refuse to concede that big changes are around the corner, many will suffer a similar fate, with the heavy bags that Willy carries into the next life stuffed with the manual typewriter and printed books that they’re unwilling to give up.

Yesterday, the San Francisco Weekly’s Nathaniel Eaton had an interview with neo-beat writer Alan Kaufman. Entitled “The Beat Goes On,” the interview was mainly about how Kaufman and others are trying to keep the beat spirit of the ‘50s and ‘60s alive in modern day San Francisco. And while I’m always glad to see the criminally underrated Richard Brautigan’s name in print (I hunted for his books all over Southern California as a teenager), Kaufman makes a few comments regarding the future of books which I think are pretty silly. A few weeks ago, in D.T. Max’s profile of Tom Staley (the curator of the Ransom literary archives at the University of Texas), Staley defended his decision to not digitize the library’s collection by saying that to do so would sacrifice some of the aesthetics of the physical item, namely the smell. Well, Kaufman goes even further than this. After saying that he doesn’t “believe writers are going to be content having their works published on the Internet,” Kaufman expands this idea by explaining that “I was looking through a book of mine from years ago and it had little pieces of food on it and I remembered the meal that I had eaten.” So I guess that, in addition to curling up in the bath with a book, if there’s enough food in the margin you can also treat yourself to a little snack (try doing that with an eBook).

All of this is in answer to the interviewer’s question, “Do you think writing’s in collapse?” Kaufman answers, “No. Writing will never be in collapse.” He then follows this up with a prediction: “What’s going to happen, I believe, and I’m very excited by this prospect, is that writers will form their own collectives, as was done in the Sixties [and publish their own books]. I don’t think I’m a dinosaur in thinking this way.”

Kaufman’s completely correct that writers will create their own collectives. But what will make these collectives different from what happened in the ‘60s is that — because of the global interconnectedness of the Web — these scenes will no longer have to be centered around one geographic location (or, in the case of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury scene, a couple of city blocks). Instead, writers from all over the globe will be able to meet and interact with other writers, trading ideas and swatches of prose and verse. What’s also different, I think, is that books will be the least interesting aspect of this; it will be about the exchange of ideas and the feeling of community (and, as Second Life has shown, virtual communities can feel — for many people — just as authentic as the real thing). As I wrote earlier in the week, blogs have now replaced zines. But the zine movement itself, at the time, was simply a new version of the mimeographed chapbook scene of the ‘70s. Technology always plays a part in edging forward artists, and the Internet is simply the latest iteration of this. The same way that San Francisco’s iconic City Lights bookstore was, as Kaufman reminds us, “the first all-paperback bookstore in the United States,” new websites and Internet communities will shatter the literary boundaries and rules that the beats similarly exploded fifty years ago.

As has been previously reported here and here (with Galleycat’s Ron Hogan intelligently explaining that spam is hardly the answer), it looks like the San Diego Union Tribune is going to cut back/streamline its book review section. To exactly what extent the section will be reduced or redefined has not yet been announced, but San Diego literary agent Sandy Dijkstra isn’t letting the lack of details slow her down. Instead of waiting to hear about the Union Tribune’s plans for its book review, Dijkstra has already started forwarding around an e-mail asking people to take, uh, action:

Some of you may recall that some years ago, we faced a similar crisis of losing our Book Review. At that time, we circulated a “chain letter with a civic purpose”, describing the San Diego reading community via stats and then, presenting a threat: IF the Book Review were not restored, we, the readers, writers, booksellers and publishers of San Diego, would evoke the spirit of Fahrenheit 451 and descend upon the offices of the San Diego Union-Tribune, bearing a coffin filled with the books of the many authors whose works would no longer be reviewed. We would then stage a READ-IN until we got news that our needs would be addressed. This threat, together with a deluge of chain letters hitting Mrs. Copley, forced the paper to restore the Review.

This is all incredibly silly, and will likely hurt the book review more than help. Because to portray books that don’t get reviewed as “dead” is not only lame (and wrong) in terms of a book’s worth, but it’s also terribly disrespectful to things which actually are actually, sadly dead. Dijkstra’s campaign, along with the pitchfork-wielding efforts of others (key words in above are “threat” and “force”), has really nothing to do with the true nature of books or the discovery of reading. Instead, what Dijkstra is really mourning is a literary status quo that she seems desperate to not let slip away.

The LA Weekly this past week had a cover story in their literary supplement section entitled “The Bookish Set,” which profiles a number of independent Los Angeles booksellers, including the owners or staff of places like Book Soup, Dutton’s and Skylight. Having previously lived in LA for years, I’m familiar with all of these places. In fact, I remember being in Book Soup one time when someone asked for The Celestine Prophecy, and the guy behind the counter talked them out of it. I also did a reading from my first novel at the Brentwood Dutton’s in 1995 that Patricia Wettig, who had been shopping in the store when I started — I’ll never forget — walked out of.

The Weekly story highlights the fact that, even though all of these stores are going through changes and publishing’s not what it used to be, this book-loving cadre of “wise, savvy, and by turns funny and tragic” misfits are here to stay: “Despondent at times about the future of their industry yet determined to see it through in some as-yet-unknown fashion, they and their workplaces are gloriously idiosyncratic in a culture veering precariously toward sameness.”

But what I find most interesting about the story is that I live in New York and yet I can still read the LA Weekly. I left Los Angeles in early 1997, right when the Internet was starting to become the phenomenon it is today (when I was looking for a roommate that January, one of them said they’d looked me up on Amazon because I said I’d had a book published, and I distinctly remember thinking, “What’s Amazon?”). And yet now the LA Weekly website touts itself as “The Essential Online Resource for Los Angeles.”

What was a decade ago just printed words on paper, distributed in kiosks around town that were sometimes full and sometimes empty when you went to get a copy, now also exists as a completely electronic, interactive multimedia experience. What was ten years ago just a free newspaper that came out once a week, dropped off on street corners where it sometimes got soaked by the rain or bleached by the sun, now lives eternally online in a pristine, Dorian Gray-like state. I used to make it a point to, every Thursday, get a copy of the Weekly. But now readers, anywhere in the world, can get its info any time they want. That’s a huge positive, and a great leap forward. Print may be dead, but instead of mourning we should be celebrating what it’s being replaced by.

WLS: The Bookish Set

Writing in the Los Angeles Times over the weekend, book and film critic Richard Schickel has an opinion piece entitled “Not everybody’s a critic” in which he excoriates bloggers and declares that an atmosphere in which everyone can contribute to the literary conversation is a “wasteland.” Fun, right? Wait, it get’s worse…

To start with, Schickel comes out swinging: “The most grating words I’ve read in a newspaper recently were in a New York Times report on the shrinkage of book reviewing in many of the nation’s leading newspapers.” Mind you, we’re at war, people are dying, the Middle East is once again lighting up like a Roman candle, but what really gets Schickel’s goat is the fact that the world may no longer be able to know what Michiko Kakutani thinks of D.B.C. Pierre.

After this apocalyptic opening, Schickel doesn’t waste any time — or many words — in getting straight to his point: “Criticism — and its humble cousin, reviewing — is not a democratic activity. It is, or should be, an elite enterprise, ideally undertaken by individuals who bring something to the party beyond their hasty, instinctive opinions of a book (or any other cultural object).”

I would now be making fun of Schickel if he weren’t already so profoundly making fun of himself. His words are truly the worst kind of snobbery, and his logic is so twisted the inside of his mind must look like spin art (done in black ink). He’s so concerned with who is bestowing the judgment that he doesn’t care about the judgment itself; he only cares from whose lips the words are issued. To him, all bloggers are just hoi polloi with HPs.

Schickel also writes: “The review’s highest business is to initiate intelligent dialogue about the work in question, beginning a discussion that, in some cases, will persist down the years, even down the centuries.”

Again, I would be ridiculing Schickel for being a pretentious snob if he weren’t so intent on saving me the trouble by heaping ridicule upon himself. Not since Milli Vanilli declared that they were “more talented than any Bob Dylan” has an artist or critic so overstated their own importance.

Even the title of his essay, “Not everybody’s a critic,” is totally wrong. These days, in a flattened Web 2.0 world, where the notions of so many things — television, music, communication, and now publishing — have been shattered, more people than ever have a voice. But Schickel just wishes everyone would keep it down; can’t they see he’s speaking?

LA Times: Not everybody’s a critic