There's No Love for the Old-School Reporter Anymore

So the verdict seems to be that print is on its way out. All those old flagship papers like the Chicago Tribune, New York Times and Boston Globe are going down like the Titanic. The old-time hard-drinking, two-fisted warhorse reporter has been sent out to pasture.

Not only that, but the middlebrow news magazines like Time and Newsweek have devolved to slim little rags full of news-lite. Other mags like U.S. News and World Report and Christian Science Monitor have forsaken print completely and are now available strictly online. Niche magazines? Forget it. Just in the last six months or so, music mags like Blender, Vibe and No Depression have gone off to the great newsstand in the sky, never to return.

Even more astonishing is the way that 24 hr cable news has been shaken up by the immediacy of blogs and social networking sites like Twitter, with CNN reporting on Tweets and calling them “unverified sources” (crazy!).

There are plenty of reasons why…print obviously has a very high fixed cost, just in terms of newsprint, presses, layout, labor, shipping and everything else you can think of. And when you read a newspaper, you’re obviously reading about something that happened 12 to 24 hours ago. Cable news?  How 1980s of you.  “Citizen journalists” have the edge on that.  And lots of cable-TV viewers are rethinking their cable subscriptions (or even owning a TV), when all that content is available on Hulu.

So it’s all changing, for the better, right?  Not so fast.

The hot device that’s supposed to replace print is the Kindle.  I don’t own a Kindle, nobody I know has one, and I have yet to even get my bacon-greasy paws on one, yet they’re supposed to be the savior of newspapers.  But then I hear that, from all accounts, the Kindle is not a good way to navigate the content that’s in a newspaper.  It forces you to scan the entire length of an article, where if you had it in newsprint form in front of you, you could easily follow the familiar old inverted-pyramid form of news writing and skip ahead to the bottom of the story if you wanted to….and then just move on to the next one without having to touch a screen, press buttons or do anything else.  Plus you can’t lay a Kindle out in front of you, spread across the kitchen table on a Sunday morning, and take your time reading it while trying to shoo the cats off of it.

And as for “citizen journalists…”

Remember Matt Drudge, and the way that the Drudge Report and supermarket tabloids set the tone for the Clinton presidency?  That gave rise to a whole class of “citizen journalists” who don’t have to adhere to any sort of  journalistic standards of veracity or impartiality, preaching to their choirs and pandering to the intellectually incurious.

There may be some 21st Century Edward R. Murrows in the ranks, but there’s also the loads of hogwash on the Internets that suggest that, say, JFK was assassinated by a German shepherd.

And it’s not just print and cable news.  Lots of times older tech is still just better.  Better made, works better, sounds better, and it’s better liked by users.

Here in my office I’ve got a big ol’ 1970s Marantz 2235B receiver.  It’s analog, it weighs 40 lbs, it’s got a big blue dial and a flywheel that you spin to tune in stations mechanically.  It looks like this:

photo credit: classic-audio.com

It’s a dinosaur piece of audio gear.  But it sounds light-years better than the Denon 7.1 home theater rig out in the living room, with its Dolby decoding and all-digital amplification, and it doesn’t take an audiophile’s discerning ear to hear the difference.  Feh.

Also here in the office I’m surrounded by a few silverface Fender guitar amps.  They look like this:

All vacuum tubes, hand-wired point-to-point chassis and military-style build quality.  That’s why a 70s-era silverface Fender Deluxe Reverb sells for $1000 or so, but a Deluxe reissue with a printed-circuit chassis and particle-board cabinet only goes for about $600.  And even though vacuum tubes are stone-age technology, there are enough purists to keep the trade in them alive (even if the only remaining tube plants in the world are in China and Eastern Europe).  And that’s not even touching on the musicians who’d still rather record on an old Ampex 1-inch 8-track recorder (the size and weight of a washing machine) hooked up to a good board and solid preamps…rather than a pitch-corrected ProTools rig with all the plugins.

Remember vinyl?

photo credit: terracycle.net

Complete with clicks, pops, scratches?  And the elaborate cover art and layout? And the gatefold cardboard covers that were so popular for cleaning the stems and seeds out of a batch of weed?  Vinyl still sells.  Vinyl sounds warmer and more real than the CD’s that we were sold on back in the Eighties.  Yeah, the CD’s that we were told were “indestructible,” that you could throw out in the street and let city buses run over ‘em all day, then just throw ‘em in the dishwasher and they’d be fine.  And don’t even get me started on the jewel case, one of the most abominable product-packaging ideas of the last 100 years.  CD’s kill vinyl? Don’t think so.

Nobody likes Word ‘07.  It’s harder to use and less intuitive than previous versions.  And then I got a Kyocera Wild Card phone recently…it looks like this:

It replaced my battered Nokia, which was about four years old (60 years old in cell-phone years):

photo credit: propertyroom.com

The Kyocera has full web access! A qwerty keyboard! A Camera! Flashlight! Wow!  Of course that’s a couple of years behind the time, and it’s like a Fisher-Price product compared to an iPhone, but I was astonished at what-all this Swiss Army Knife of a phone could do.

Not so pleased, though, with the fact that it regularly freezes up while trying to type out text messages.  Not so pleased with the tiny keyboard buttons that thwart my clumsy thumbs. Not pleased with the fact that the ringtone is never loud enough for me to hear it when it’s in my pocket.   Definitely not pleased with the fact that the back of the phone is held on with a screw (how 1970s!) for the frequent times that I have to open it up and pop the battery out so it’ll reboot the freezeup problem.

So…nobody wants an old refrigerator.  No one wants a 1960s Magnavox TV that isn’t compatible with anything modern.  No one wants a circa-1984 IBM PC Jr. No one wants a VHS machine (not, at least, until they come full-circle and VHS tapes become ironic and hip again).  And I’m no 21st-century Luddite with his head in the sand, but newer isn’t necessarily better, either, just because it’s new.

And that brings us back to newspapers and the Kindle.  Will the Kindle become the 8-track player of the future?  Hard to say.  It may wind up being superseded by some new media technology, or it may just evolve from its present form.  Consumer spending habits may just make the final call on that.

One thing for sure, though…you can’t cover up with a Kindle when you’re sleeping on a park bench after you’ve lost your home to foreclosure…