Newspapers and the Printing Press or History Sometimes Rhymes

Well, Disaster Cat has been under the weather for a couple of days. Not from rain, although we have continued to have that in Ireland, but mostly from a rather nasty cold combined with a tummy bug that seems to have been going around.  I am happy to report that after two days on the sofa, I'm at least back to reading web sites and following the news.  I am also glad to report that our downstairs office is almost dry. Yeah!

Quick flooding update: while the water is going down in many areas, spot flooding continues in various parts of Ireland.  Many places still have water on the roads, which makes driving a guessing game, and a lot of people will be staying in hotels or with relatives during the holidays.  The water is simply staying put in a lot of the lower-lying places, so it may be several weeks before people can get in to start cleaning up.  The current flood headline of the day is: 

Roads flooded as Fermanagh hit by more torrential rain

(click on the head line to link to the full story)

The government is already talking about "relocation" of some people who had new houses built on flood plains, mostly in the last years of the Celtic Tiger.  How to pay for that remains to be seen, but on the whole I suspect it would be worth it in the long run.  Nowhere in Ireland is going to be totally safe from flooding, we just get too much rain, but places that the old people remember always being under water are just not good places to build tracts of houses.  Even if it seemed like a good idea at the time....

Now, however, I'm going to do a Disaster Cat MEOW on another subject.
While this is off the topic of local Irish News, it is very much on topic in terms of how the news is obtained.  Right now, there is a huge debate about the future of newspapers and of books; but as a former history major, I try to take a long view.  It is not as if something like the current crisis in publishing has not happened before, it has.  About five hundred years ago to be exact. 

 
I know that a popular opinion on the web is that modern newspapers are losing readers because of  the mixing of hard news with what used to be considered editorial content; either shifting to the right or the left of the political divide.  Whichever way the newspapers are going "wrong" varies with the viewpoints of the person given the opinion.  However, I think the decline of the Newspaper isn't really an editorial problem or even readership problem, it is just another symptom of the biggest change in information distribution since the introduction of the Printing Press in the early 1500's in Europe. 

Then, as now, previously existing forms of information distribution suddenly were no longer economical nor viable.  While book sellers saw their numbers increase as the common man could now purchase items previously sold only to the very wealthy, thousands of people were thrown out of work in fields such as copying, the production of parchment, and hand-illumination.  Much of that work had taken place in monasteries; certainly not all of it, but the church did take a very large hit.

Today, the printing press itself is being replaced by anyone with a computer and a web connection. These items allow minute-by-minute headlines, ensuring that the future of hard-copy newspapers does not look much brighter than the future of hard-copy books.  In fact, it is probably a lot worse, lots of people will still buy (or order as an option) hard-copy books because they like to have them on their shelves. Some books you just need to have in hard-copy, the more so if you need information when the power is off.   Day-old newspapers tend to line bird cages or recycle boxes, they do not have the shelf-life of a favorite novel or cookbook.

I'm not sure what will replace them, but something will.  However, I find the current proposal that governments just step in and fund them to be a bit disturbing.  I'm not opposed to all government funded news outlets, as long as they are stated to be such outlets.  I get a lot of news from the BBC, Radio Canada and even the old Voice of America (before the Web, when I used shortwave for news, they were even more helpful); but you know when you use these sites that they are underwritten by taxpayer money from those governments and the opinions are likely to be colored by that fact.  Even with the best "firewalls" in the world, such government funding is likely to have an influence on the news provided, and a careful reader takes that into account.

Old-fashioned newspapers also have points of view, based on their owners and operators.  In the old days these were called editorials.  In recent times, these lines have become blurred in both print and televised media, and that makes suddenly underwriting their production with US (or other) government funds to be even more worrying.  I'm not saying that such underwriting would ensure an increase in stories slanted in certain directions, but there is a big difference between many news organizations with many points of view, and a few news organizations, most of whom are underwritten by one source of funding. Of course, with modern media conglomerates, there are not that many voices in any case, but I'm not sure that government underwriting for these vast corporations would improve matters much.  In fact, there's a name for what happens when you combine government with corporations...let me see...what is it called...it is right there on the tip of my keyboard...?  I think it looks something like:

Yeah, these guys....

Like the folks in the 1500's, we just don't know what the new model of news and publishing will turn out to be.  In the short term, I do not think that hitting the public with hammers, such as Rupert Murdoch's plan to charge for all his vast empire's news stories, is going to be very lucrative.  There are simply too many other ways to gather news, and for every subscriber, ten other people will just read elsewhere.  People do pay for very specific, very targeted news sites already; but only those that provide news and opinion they can not get anywhere else.

Murdoch says Google is "stealing"

Mr. Murdoch will also have to face the fact that for many, many people; what the press considers "news" these days is not really worth paying for anyway.  In my personal experience, for every news junkie like yours truly, there are five people who are happy with a headline or two, and quite a number who can go for weeks without checking the official news at all.  Unless their news comes in a subscription package of some sort, which may be the wave of the future.  Something like cable television, where you get several on-line outlets along with your movies and on-line sports.  Without such a package, a lot of people simply will not bother to subscribe to anything at all.

But, while the future will be what it will be, for now the important thing is to make use of the resources that are there.  And for a growing number of the world's population those resources are at the click of a mouse rather than the rustle of a newspaper.  Trying to prevent that from happening, by government fiat, is like trying to enforce laws against books printed on a printed press in 1535.  You can try, with both carrots and sticks, but it is unlikely to have much effect in the long run.

Like the master weavers who found themselves replaced by mechanized looms, newspapers in the current form are overdue for a technology change.  Just as there are hobby weavers like myself, who produce limited amounts of cloth the old-fashioned way, there will probably always be a few local newspapers that serve local interests.  But to try to enforce that model on a public that is already moving away from it is not going to be any more effective than taking hammers to an industrial loom was for the Luddites.  You may stem the tide in one place, for a short while, but the waves of history will just keep rolling on over you until you sink or learn to swim alongside it.

With those thoughts in mind, Disaster Cat plants to keep Meowing here in Cyber-space, along with the occasional hiss, growl and purr.....