I’ve been a print journalist since I was 17. It’s all I know, it’s everything I love. But I’m a realist. I know newspapers and magazines are on borrowed time in their current format. Ten years, 15 at most.
The thing that bothers me about print media’s transition to the digital age – aside from all the journalists who are losing their jobs – isn’t the lack of tactile pages to turn, much as I mourn them. It’s the small stuff being squeezed out. Digital media is about shock and horror, drama and scandal, controversy and craziness.
Page views rule on news websites and it’s the in-your-face stuff that gets people in. That explains why the Sydney Morning Herald’s digital edition often bears only a fleeting resemblance to the print edition. A newspaper, on the other hand, doesn’t need wall-to-wall scandal. Sure, a few surprises keep readers turning the pages, but there’s still room for lower-key news. Stories that don’t involve transvestite porn stars chopping up their boyfriends, cannibalism, horrific medical conditions or sex slavery. The worthy, the intricate, the investigative, the colourful. I know, yawn, the worthy. But without it, what will we become? Desensitised to anything that isn’t outrageous.
I’ve seen how it works on a miniscule scale with my blog. The more sensational headlines I write, the more hits I get. So there’s a temptation to blather every day about sex or lay myself bare in other intimate ways. It means I think about reverse-censoring the blogs I write, because I know “Shoot, shag or marry”, “Naked and alone with a woman” and “Ooooh, the tits are getting bigger” will score far more attention than anything with the word “chicken” in it. Except perhaps “Naked and alone with a chicken” (must try that sometime and see … ah, what the heck, might as well try it now).
I understand that print media is dying and there’s nothing to be done about it – except hope that niche outposts will survive and thrive – but it doesn’t stop me worrying about the stories that won’t be told, the wrongs that won’t be aired and the rorts that won’t be uncovered.
Journalism will become about quick bites and sensationalism. If it can’t be told fast and furiously, it won’t be told at all.
And one day you’ll miss that. Well, some of you will. The rest will never know it even existed.
What will you miss about newspapers? Anything? Or nothing at all?
housegoeshome 
I’ll admit I only read the pages that have a headline that grabs me. I no longer buy the paper (except for the occasional Saturday SMH for the Samurai Sudoku) and read the local paper, The Newcastle Herald (to keep abreast of stuff going on in my hometown and to remind myself of some of the reason we left), the SMH and news.com.au online. Takes me about 15 minutes every morning before I go to work.
Said headlines aren’t necessarily the gory ones though.
And I have already read today’s news.
I completely agree. Makes me wonder how blogging will fare down the track. Even though traffic and headlines are still factors to consider in blogging, it remains a space where ‘small’ stories are told, often about the least sensational areas of people’s lives. You’ve given me something to ponder on the school run today, thanks.
hopefully, some form of print will always exist, even if it’s just in a magazine on the weekend. I haven’t surrendered, yet.
Damn. You got me!
Yeah, it’s a worry. People say “Oh, but I get my news from the TV or radio” etc. But most of them don’t realise how heavily TV and radio news have relied on print to do the legwork for them, and to break the stories that are not obvious. To dig around for the nasty stuff companies and governments might be getting up to on the quiet. Print newsrooms were vast – literally hundreds of reporters at the big papers, compared to a handful at TV and radio, who could just buy the morning paper, divide the stories up and put out a bulletin. No way that slack gets picked up by TV, radio or digital. Many of those important stories will simply go unreported in the future.
I use online news content only as a supplement to reading newspapers and magazines. Mostly I use it for updates or breaking news throughout the day. I can’t imagine life without my Newcastle Herald and early morning coffee at Horseshoe Beach. And I don’t want to. After that little ritual each day, I feel prepared to face the day, even if things go pear-shaped after that.
It saddens me to see you make no mention of the “dark side” ie, advertising. We too are hurting and without a commercial contribution to the bottom line there wouldn’t be a publication.
Sue, it’s not the dark side. Never has been for me. But you’re right, I’m sad about the advertising people losing their jobs too. Get the right advertising people together with the right editorial people and I still think gold could be struck.
I will miss everything about newspapers. The early trip to the newsagency when there is still a nip in the air and dew on the ground. The feel of the paper, the scrunch of it, how the ink runs when you spill your tea on it. The awkward format of the SMH that makes you invade someone else’s personal space on the train. The old copy you find folded in half in you bag a week later.
When I was single, newspapers saved me from a sense of loneliness when I went to a cafe for breakfast by myself. They served as a companion. I shall miss that. But also, given that I cut my journalism teeth on newspapers, I shall miss the “colour” writing that only a paper can give to a big event. The descriptions, the detail, the guts that TV can’t do (or do well) and radio does, but differently. Somehow, for me, when it is written it becomes seared in my brain. I shall also miss the local content, the sense that stuff is being written about my city, my country, my ‘burb, that is interesting, or that may affect me directly.I shall miss a journalist’s ability to get beyond the dross. I shall miss a profile that really gets to the guts of a person (DAvid Marr on Rudd springs to mind). I shall miss the excitement a writer can give (I shall never forget a former colleague of mine writing about the Jeff Buckley album Grace with such love and passion, before it became a massive hit). I still have all the newspaper clippings of what I have written over more than a decade. Self-interestingly, I shall miss not being able to say “that’s my byline”. Or “that’s my page one story.”
Wonderful words, Robin. Thank you.