We are nearing the end of an era in which writers hastily assemble poorly constructed pieces just before the deadline. Soon enough, editors will no longer be angrily making last-minute calls demanding a product and writing partisan pieces of hackery to serve as filler. Writers will no longer have to awkwardly send e-mails explaining why more pleasurable callings preclude them from writing anything and inane letters to the editor explaining the importance of voting won’t have to serve as a replacement to fill the page.
This is because the newspaper business is dying.
Yes, the days of fresh ink and cheap paper are nearing their end as more and more of contemporary life finds its way onto the computer screen. It’s really quite simple: As less people buy newspapers, advertising revenue decreases and the industry is forced to scale back on production. Almost every major newspaper has been forced into massive layoffs in recent years; only the domineering New York Times still stands tall amidst the onslaught — if only for now.
And because online advertising doesn’t yield the same returns, newspapers aren’t able to make a simple transition to the Internet. The continuation of the decline seems inevitable at this point. After centuries of intellectual primacy, newspapers may well be heading for extinction, taking the dreams of its countless aspiring employees along with it.
Though the industry undoubtedly has decades worth of life left in it (trains didn’t disappear with the invention of the airplane, either), it is a universe that bears the signs of impending collapse. If you were to take the time to even superficially gauge the opinions of one its inhabitants, it would be as impossible to miss the nostalgia as it is the foreboding.
But with destruction there comes opportunities for new creativity. In this sense, the revolution in the media industry must be counted as a good thing. The newspaper titans, after all, are the great purveyors of state propaganda, cultural hegemony and an arrogance that deserves to be destroyed. And it’s gotten worse. There was once a time when The New York Review of Books could find room for its token lefties like Noam Chomsky and Gore Vidal. Now, opinions in the mainstream media to the left of the Democratic Party are about as scarce as students on this campus who care about Associated Students of Madison’s efforts toward “reform.”
Newspapers are really the extensions of a few giant corporations that have interests in all areas of the economy. It’s inevitable that their viewpoints are going to reflect those of the elite, and this explains the conformity of opinion on its pages.
Today, with the ascendancy of the Internet, readers can get their information from sources around the world — almost instantaneously. To get information about the massacre in Gaza or the daily hundreds that are slaughtered in Iraq, one needn’t read the filtered articles of the Times. Now, one can learn about the happenings from reputable sources that aren’t afraid to offend the architects of official opinion. The playing field has been leveled: It’s just as easy to click to the Times as it is to The Nation or Counterpunch.
For both radicals and non-radicals alike, the new media offers not a new universe of information but rather the ability to instantly travel between universes and absorb differing perspectives as part of one’s daily routine. Regardless of what one thinks of the current hegemonic political opinion, who can really say that the infusion of new information and opinions, creating an actual marketplace of ideas, is a bad thing?
Inevitably, the powerful will attempt to reclaim their domination over the dissemination of information, though their ability to do so is not yet clear. For now, subversive ideas have a unique opportunity to reach more people than any other time in recent history. Orwell would have been ecstatic.
Kyle Szarzynski ([email protected]), who did not turn in his article on time yesterday, is a senior majoring in history and philosophy.
