Collapse of print journalism not completely irreversible

By Casey Michel     8/20/09 7:00pm

I saw the implosion from the inside out. The collapse of journalism, the creaking and crumbling and crashing of an industry that keeps politicians to task and athletes in the glare. I saw the faces behind it, the dinosaurs who were too slow or too unaware to update the business model when they could.I was in the middle of it this summer, in the New York magazine district, gleaning the lessons learnt from the movers of the publishing world. They admitted their failings. They told me what to expect in the immediate future. They made sure that my job prospects were grounded in reality, stuck in the mud of the recession and the layoffs.

I sat with them, face-to-face, microphone-to-audience, and heard them lay out their plans for rejiggering journalism's foundations.

And I didn't see worry. I didn't see the sallow, empty drones I was promised. I didn't see the hapless executives rustling the leaves for the Mad Max leftovers.

---

---

I saw reason to hope.

Not Obama-style hope, the kind the fills you up and lifts you out - but a prescient, calm hope, one that doesn't translate into puffed-up speeches and inevitable compromise. It was the kind of hope that gets you thinking, the kind of hope that reminds you why you chose to work in an industry that everyone is already eulogizing.

They only barely talked of the present. Sure, they touched on the downsizing, how people with dozens of years of experience, not to mention entire magazines, had found themselves in the Manhattan soup lines. They sugar-coated nothing. Instead, they focused on the crux of the issue, and the reason why misanthropes are too short-sighted to see the way things are going.

The issue at hand, for those under the rocks, is the inevitable transition of paper to digital. The Great Recession hurt, but that was out of the industry's hands. It was the omnipresence of the Internet, a would-be partner turned death-knell enemy, that turned newspapers into the coal locomotive, a useful but heavily-outdated - and environmentally unfriendly - means of transport.

To wit: Is there inherent value to a newspaper or a magazine? To the physicality of the ink and the paper? Perhaps, for historical reasons. The creation of digital information is a foreign concept to much of America, whereas the block-and-palette technology is obvious to anyone who took third-grade art class.

Online media is no longer the digital elephant in the room; it's as real as Brett Favre's idiocy. (For proof, check out ricethresher.org for up-to-the-minute updates on pertinent news and sports stories). The giants of the magazines know this, and they know it well, which is why their ideas, wide and varied and radical, are more than enough to quell my nerves. Granted, to avoid getting blackballed, the details can't be hashed out in this column. But you know the Kindle? Yeah, get used to it, but don't blanche when you meet its new and improved cousin.

The plans are laid out, leading out of this mire and into a dichotomous print and digital future. A future in which journalists may not be looking over their backs as the axe of unemployment comes down on their heads. While that axe is still out there, swinging with its Bunyan-like force, it will soon tire.

See, there will always be both the need and the desire for journalism. No one's disputing this claim. Just look at you, right now, strolling the Inner Loop or lounging at Brochstein or pedaling down Kirby (please be careful). This, the dead tree edition of a 93-year-old paper, is what Rice students were reading under Woodrow Wilson, when the Dodgers abandoned Brooklyn and when the Berlin Wall disintegrated. You're looking at the product of decades of work, hundreds of thousands of man-hours dedicated to bringing you all the news between the hedges.

And it will change soon, too, with newer-better-faster online content coming to you in waves over the next few years.

So don't give up yet. Not on the industry, and certainly not on us. Because while the implosion's happening, the reconstruction is taking place, even as we speak, from the inside out.

Casey Michel is a Brown College senior and Thresher editor in chief.

---