Updated Sunday, Jan. 9, 2011, 7:49 pm, EST
TAKEAWAY: It is a new year and our minds change to resolutions, which usually translate into changes of behavior. Good time for us to discuss change and how its presence can scare some, inspire others.
It is good to be back with TheMarioBlog after almost a month off to celebrate the holidays and to shift my thinking from the daily challenges of work to the more domestic ones of enjoying family life at home. However, all good things eventually end, and I always welcome change, so now I am ready to hit the road again and to continue my effort to write something of interest here for those of you who honor me with your daily visits.
Change is, indeed, the word that I want to write about today.
Funny how so many of the holiday greetings I have received from friends in the industry managed to include short little comments such as : What do you see as the big change for 2011? How many newspapers will not be around by the end of this coming year? Will the iPad fever lower its pitch?
I have read all of these with great interest and a smile on my face.
While organizing my home office during my period of domestic adjustment, I ran across one of my favorite articles by Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, the well known historian of early printing, whose writing centers on media transitions and how we have reacted to new modes of communicating throughout history. Eisenstein is professor emeritus of history at the University of Michigan. The article I refer to is titled The End of the Book? Some Perspectives on Media Change (The American Scholar, 1995).
The present always scared some
The reason I reread this article from time to time is because it helps me understand the arguments I hear daily as I move from newsroom to newsroom.
Eisenstein’s piece helps us put current attitudes about the changes in the media in some historical perspective. Today, for example, there are those who are ready to preside over the funeral of printed newspapers; there is also those who see the digital media not just as the cause of the printed press’ premature demise, but also as platforms that are more shallow and one dimensional.
Both groups are wrong, in my view. The real discussion is not about the disappearance of any medium. Instead, it is about the coexistence of the various media, with storytelling as the centerpiece. And if you think that was a theme I visited frequently in 2010, then be prepared to have it presented here again in 2011, perhaps even more forcefully.
Basically, Eisenstein’s theory is that some critics have been forecasting the demise of books for a long time. She singles out the 1960s when electronic mass media, radio, film and television were singled out as being chiefly responsible for the book’s demise. As we know, books did not disappear in the 60s. Today, the argument is more readily made about newspapers. Ironically, both books and newspapers have found new platforms and even new audiences through the digital platforms. In fact, reading books is on the rise, regardless of platform: Research shows that people with e-readers are reading more books. A recent survey found that 40 percent of those with e-readers said they were reading more books than they used to before they had the device, which is consistent with earlier data on e-reading habits.Publishers’ book sales tracked by the Association of American Publishers for the first half of 2010 were up by 11.6 percent for the year-to-date.
But Eisenstein takes us even further back to make her point, as the reactions to the advent of movable type. Not everyone welcomed this “progress” and, in fact, the opposite was true. Conservatives and reactionaries regarded printing as “responsible for the spread of poisonous Jacobinical and atheistical doctrines.”
Gleams of the future——then and now——signify progress and advancement to some, restriction and extinction to others. Nothing new here.
In the newsrooms I visit, I find members of both of these groups; the most successful media houses lie somewhere in between, places where people have a sound and solid respect for the past, but who are also visionaries who look forward and discover daily how their stories can best be served through new platforms.
“Premature obituaries on the death of the sermon and the end of the book are themselves testimony to long-enduring habits of mind. In the very act of heralding the dawn of a new age with the advent of new media, contemporary analysts continue to bear witness, however inadvertently, to the ineluctable persistence of the past,” Eisenstein concludes.
Special note: I invite you to read the Eisenstein piece. I have a printed copy which I obtained from The Poynter Institute for Media Studies’ Library when it first was published. My efforts to get it online through The American Scholar have not been successful. Now, David Shedden, director of the Poynter Library, writes me that he has checked and the archives for the “American Scholar” journal seem to only go back to 2004, so he thinks the article is not available online. “It looks like they are in the process of slowly placing older articles online,” Shedden tells me. People interested could try contacting them directly to purchase older stories. Information is available on the following page—
http://www.theamericanscholar.org/archives/
And about those questions……
By the way, friends, let me try to answer those questions on your holiday cards:
What do you see as the big change for 2011?
I don’t have a crystal ball in front of me to forecast the big or small change. However, I can wish for a change: let no publisher go out there with the Digital First banner; let print newspaper editors come happily to do print each day (their newspapers will be better and stick around longer)
How many newspapers will not be around by the end of this coming year?
Again, that’s the type of math that I am not interested in calculating. However, newspaper publishers and editors who fail to adapt to the realities of storytelling in 2011 will probably preside over the least successful newspapers.
Will the iPad fever lower its pitch?
I don’t think so. There will be more people worldwide getting an iPad, and when the next version arrives, there will be a higher fever pitch to witness.
And that, I believe, will force all of us to produce better stories, with improved visual content. Win win situation.
The story as protagonist
One day during the holidays at home I had the pleasure to read a long narrative that reminded me that it is all about the story.
The story, in the St. Petersburg Times (Sunday, January 2, 2011 edition) was by staff writer Jeff Klinkenberg and centered on an unusually weird fellow who was known as “Slim” to generations of St. Petersburg anglers. Slim, who was nearly 7 feet tall and walked with a limp, was a regular at the downtown pier until the late 1970s. Slim speared sheepshead and mullet and sold them out of a shopping cart. Klinkenberg followed the trail of the guy with the resemblance to Frankenstein and pieced together one of those stories you wished would not end.
I wrote a note to Jeff to tell him so. As I was totally absorbed reading it, the medium was not at all important, the story was.
Let us make the story the protagonist in 2011.
That’s the one thing that has not changed.
Newspaper design contest in India
It is that time of the year again. Interested in entering your pages in a design contest? Here is how to do it:
Entries invited to the second edition of India’s first newspaper design competition conducted by www.newspaperdesign.ning.com
The Categories are
1.Best of Page one
2.Best of Feature page
3.Best of Business Page
4.Best of Art/literature Page
5.Best of Sports Page
6.Best of Infographics
7.Best of Centrespread
8.Best of Redesigned Daily