I’m having a tough time lately trying to decide which magazine and newspaper subscriptions to renew and which ones to let slide. This is a personal thing happening to me, but it is also a widespread phenomenon. Suddenly, people are doing their reading and their newshounding online and don’t have time to do the reading on paper they used to. I’m in the thick of the miasma of changing habits.
There are several things that are causing this, and it has the print industry in a tizzy. Every day we are hearing about newspapers cutting their staff and reducing the size of their publications by hacking off an inch on each side and 4 inches off the bottom. What used to be a gigantic paper large enough to perfectly line a kitty litter tray when folded has now turned into a tidy smaller thing that you can easily tuck under your arm or hold over your head in the rain, but isn’t big enough any more even to efficiently swat flies.
If you think size doesn’t matter, then ask the staff that got fired or the reporters who now get paid by the inch whether they think it’s important. Size does matter. Yes, that’s right. Journalists are now going to be paid BY THE INCH, the measure of the length of their columns. Not by quality of reporting, not by expertise, not by importance of the story or god forbid, the truth, but by the inch. Honestly, if I may use such a controversial term, the journalism industry has been reduced to one and only one raison d’etre –quite solely and literally, the bottom line. Unfortunately, the bottom line is also bringing the end of the line into view. As my young friend would say, “well, duh.”
In philosophy, they ask when is a matchbook not a matchbook? In other words, how many matches can you tear out and still have a matchbook? All of them, you say. It’s still a matchbook. But then start tearing up the matchbook. Tear a tiny little corner off. Is it still a matchbook? Yes. But keep tearing, and at some point you realize that all you have are unrecognizable fragments of what originally was a matchbook, and the thing you have reduced to unrecognizability can no longer be called by the name of whatever it formerly was, but merely tagged as something that used to be what it no longer is. Well, this kind of thing is happened to a lot of things besides matchbooks.
I had a small fear that one day soon somebody like Bill O’Reilly will be writing for Science News. At first the thought amused me, but then it really really scared me because I could not deem it impossible. I do not categorize anything as impossible these days although I truly used to think the impossible would stay that way. Not any more. Reality is up for grabs and anything is possible, even the disappearance of the tried and true, the staid and secure, or things we thought would go on forever, like the newspaper and magazine industries.
At any rate, I’m writing to say that I have given up newspapers and magazines I never thought I ever would. My daily subscription to The New York Times, is an example, though I still do Sundays. I’ve halted the arrival of news magazines like Time and Newsweek not so much because of temporal considerations but because they now seem more like People or US instead of actual news.
I find things like the Economist and The Nation and the New York Review of Books essential, but who now has the time even for Utne Reader or Mother Jones or Scientific American?
I’ve gotten over strong and lengthy infatuations and have even let long-term commitments to subscriptions run their course to the point where I just didn’t much care for whatever publication once had me wildly in love. American Photo. I have hung on to the bitter end with subscriptions that it grieved me to let go, but I had to, like one must a terminally ill pet. I have been furious that a magazine that used to be my favorite now pleases me not one little bit. Things I still love I’ve let go, like The Journal of Irreproducible Results, which gave me enormous pleasure. There is so much to be found in Vanity Fair and Esquire and Yoga Journal and Men’s Journal, and of course the lofty Foreign Affairs, The New Yorker, Atlantic and Harper’s. But mostly, it’s about time and that I’ve moved online to try to sift through the best of those things. There are not enough hours in the day for explorations in cyberspace.
But I can just say this: whether it is in the form that it now is (print on paper), whether it stays constant and faithful (like a good dog), and even if something happens and it’s not refreshing, insightful, interesting or enlightening like I want it to be, I will never, not ever, give up my Science News, even though I’m not a scientist. And I won’t give up News Photographer, the NPPA publication, even though I’m not a news photographer.
A friend told me that Descartes was never a Cartesian, Abraham was never a Jew, Jesus was never a Christian, Muhammad wasn’t a Muslim, and Bohr was never a bore (joke). But really, some things just cannot be categorized, and those things are things that are real. To be real isn’t to “be” anything. It is simply, to “be.” Truth and discovery, it seems, just ‘are.’
So maybe I shouldn’t say I’ll never ever give up Science News, or News Photographer, but instead that I’ll never ever give up wanting to know news in science and news in photojournalism. And just plain news, news, and more news. That’s more like it. Remember when V in V for Vendetta says “Behind this mask is flesh and behind this flesh is an idea, and ideas are bulletproof. You can not kill an idea…” Did you see that film? That line all by itself was worth it. Things don’t die, they just change form. Ideas become realities that turn into memories. We are born, have a lot of thoughts and do a lot of things, and then when we’re not here anymore, the evidence that we were here persists. Matter into energy and energy into matter and so forth. And that goes for news in science and news the world over. For now, I’m hanging onto my Science News and News Photographers magazines. When and if they are online only, I will be there.
Beverly, I saw V for Vendetta! Great movie.
At a kundalini ‘yoga of sound’ workshop this weekend, Mehtab mentioned something he called ‘information dementia,’ which I think he was defining as a state of no-thinking or even wrong-thinking brought on by the continual onslaught of information we’re all confronted with now on a daily basis. I tried googling the words ‘information dementia’ just now and came up with 271,000 references to ‘dementia information.’ Case in point, wouldn’t you say?
But I still believe we are headed toward something better. Zen mind?
Deborah
Maybe this post should be titled, “Some things you just can’t let go.” Or maybe, “Some things you just can’t easily embrace.”
As a part of a younger generation, it is easier for me to become comfortable and fluent in a rapidly changing media landscape. There’s waves of articles bemoaning how and why newspapers are failing, and that used to make me really sad. It still makes me sad that there aren’t as many paid positions for journalists. But people adapt. Case in point: A friend who was a die-hard print journalist when we graduated from college recently got laid off from her print job due to budget restrictions. Almost right away, she found a new job with an online publication.
I sense that older generations, so used to a solid definition of media as newspaper, radio, and television, are uncomfortable with the fluid definition of media that’s come with the explosion of the internet - what we call “new media.” But think about what’s going on in those traditional media sources: Rupert Murdoch buys the Wall Street Journal, and yes, Bill O’Reilly could be writing for it. Time has turned into People because they’re desperate to attract readers. Is that because of the Internet is drawing readers away, or because readers prefer celebrities over thoughtful journalism?
Either way, new media gives people choice. Left, right, or center, corporate or independent, citizen or professional journalism, word or video or interactive. Some of - okay, a lot of it - it is crap, but a lot of it is really, really good. I discover and learn new things every day that I never would reading one paper or listening to NPR.
I’ll never give up my subscription to the New Yorker (which I just got this year, actually), but I also like listening to the New Yorker podcasts. And I think the people who make the New Yorker like that, too. Certainly, I like having the ability to do extended interview podcasts when a scientist is saying something more complicated than I can manage to explain in a 90 second radio podcast. We should think about where media is headed, but we should accept that we can no longer define it the way we once did.
Deborah and Lindsay,
Wonderful points you both make! It is so true, that the transition is a little more difficult for the older of us than the younger. The young people were born during transitional times, and so it’s like being raised with a horse and riding since you were three. You guys were born with a computer mouse in your hand! Those of us who weren’t are divided into two groups — ones who embrace the technology and ones who don’t. I’m proud to be among the former, and absolutely LOVE cyberspace. I do, I do, I do!
I write a monthly column for The Digital Journalist, which is online only but also a transitional type of publication that originally was intended by our publisher Dirck Halstead, a former White House photographer for TIME, to be the new online LIFE Magazine, for which he has the honor of being the youngest person ever to be on their staff because he was hired at 17 to go shoot war in Guatemala for them!
We go to media symposia and conferences frequently, and have been aware now of the crisis particularly in the industry of print media. This is why Dirck he offers his Platypus Workshops, trying to infuse video and digital skills into still photographers, because that industry is threatened too. It’s all going digital! We of course are delighted to see so many of the wonderful things about the digital age, and encourage it all. It’s a great idea too, to think that over time we will reduce the environmental impact of using so much paper, paper, paper all the time for magazines that you read and toss immediately. Everything is so much better, more efficient, glitzier, and can contain more information on-line. That is the upside!
The downside that has everybody breaking out into shingles is the economic side of it. The giants of the media business, the newspapers and magazines, depend on their gigantic budgets that are paid for by massive advertising to pay for their journalists to do the job of reporting. The problem they are facing in the transition is that online advertising differs vastly from print advertising, and so it is tricky to keep the economic side of everything rolling along while the transformation takes place. Hence, so many budget cuts, so many cutbacks, so many staff dismissals, and restricting influences on the vast network of journalists around the world who give us our information. Ultimately, what has everyone sweating, is that we will not be able to get adequate amounts of news from real journalists. I have written columns for The Digital Journalist about “citizen journalism,” which is a fairly new and important phenomenon. We saw it much when the Tsunami happened in Indonesia. The news we had was not from journalists, but from ordinary people. Nobody knows how it is all going to go, but everybody agrees that is is GOING! Whether it will be going going gone, or just go go go, nobody knows.
It’s a terrifically exciting time, and I think Deborah is right when she talks about the coming Zen mind. We all will have to get on the meditative horse sooner or later in order to ride the waves of the future.
Deborah, I know the Gong/Yoga of Sound class you’re talking about with Methab at Yoga Yoga. He’s my favorite over there and taught us so much when I got my instructorship certificate in Kundalini Yoga a few years ago. I recommend that classe or other and all classes in Yoga Yoga for everybody. Yoga rocks! And it is just the thing we need to help us float through to the new landscape of the future.
Thanks so much for both of your notes. This is all such a fascinating subject to me, and you two are the perfect commentators!
Beverly
I like very much the writings and pictures and explanations in your adress so I look forward to see your next writings. I congratulate you.