Print: use it or lose it

Many legends tell of the destruction of the Library of Alexandria. Founded sometime around 300BC, it was burned one or more times, by accident, by act of war or as a deliberate suppression of its content, between the first and seventh centuries AD. Whatever the truth – and, as Neal Stephenson has pointed out in Wired, ‘It’s inherently difficult to get reliable information about an event that consisted of the destruction of all recorded information’ – the myth of an irreplaceable source of knowledge disappearing overnight has haunted writers and historians ever since.

In our own age, when news travels so fast that our myths are all about tomorrow, the latest Alexandria to be torched is the newspaper industry. David Simon, who made a TV series about criminals (The Wire) and therefore must be a world authority on the media, recently told the Guardian that printed news is finished and the future is paid-for websites. He’s wrong on both counts, but the panic he’s expressing is widely felt. Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer hasn’t helped, telling the Washington Post in 2008: ‘There will be no media consumption left in ten years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines in paper form.’ Ouch.

Steve might, just possibly, be slightly biased, but print doomsayers also include Vanity Fair’s Michael Wolff (‘If Newsweek is around in five years, I’ll buy you dinner’), the University of North Carolina’s Philip Meyer (‘We would be wise not to focus too much on traditional media. The death spiral might be irreversible’) and New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger (‘I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care’).

Even MacUser’s own sister magazine (and rarely has the word ‘sister’ been so ironically employed), Maxim, has switched its UK edition from paper to pixels. Already doing nicely out of new online-only titles such as iGizmo and iMotor, its publishers will no doubt make a success of iMaxim. But the decision looks sad for print.

Is it the right move? The Finnish daily Taloussanomat decided at the end of 2007 that the time had come to swap the web offset press for the world wide web. According to a detailed study by Neil Thurman at City University, the decision saved a little more in costs than it lost in revenues, but discontinuing the print edition damaged the performance of the web version compared to those of print-based rivals. Sticking with print would have meant slightly higher losses in the short term, but more readers.

Which, as any fule kno, is a better position, because when you have people interested in your content, you can at least hope – and this is a business model not unfamiliar to the giants of New Media – to figure out some way of getting money from them in the future.

So ditching print isn’t necessarily the smart plan. Ink lovers might also be cheered by the fortunes of ShortList, another men’s mag, run by former Maxim US editor Mike Soutar. Like a website, it’s free, given away in selected cities (annoyingly, not including mine*) similarly to the new wave of free commuter newspapers but with a glossier edge, and its audited circulation of 505,970 exceeds even the glory days of the traditional men’s interest sector. Advertising has always contributed far more to magazines’ coffers than cover price, and even in a recession advertisers will pay to reach that level of readership.

I’m not saying free print is necessarily the future. One of the medium’s timeless strengths is that people will pay for a physical object, because it has an intrinsic value that online content lacks. And no longer uniquely serving the function of quotidian information delivery could be liberating as well as threatening. As David Byrne says in the introduction to Lewis Blackwell’s book on David Carson, The End of Print, the radical innovation in 1990s graphic design was possible because ‘Print is no longer obligated to simply carry the news.’ Or, as Marshall McLuhan put it, ‘When a means of communication has outlived its relevance, it becomes a work of art.’ It could be argued that magazines made that transition at their inception.

But I’d rather see the world’s great print publications given away than lose them altogether. Not because the web can’t support proper journalism; on the contrary, readers will get more rather than less picky about their sources of news and views, and there’s no good reason why a successful advertising-funded Internet-only newspaper shouldn’t be able to run a decent newsroom.

It’s just that I don’t want to live in a virtual world. We already have hot desks, online chats, banks with no branches and phones with no buttons. Who needs a newspaper that you can’t fold the way you like it, scribble in the margins of, leave in the loo and scrumple up for firelighters? By the time you finish reading this page, someone will have written an iPhone app that simulates all of the above. But it really won’t be the same.

If the medium is the message, Adam Banks would still prefer the large.

Published in MacUser, 8 May 2009

UPDATE: It is now, allegedly, distributed in Newcastle, although I’ve never seen it. Since I’m within the target audience, they might want to get that sorted out.

Tagged as: Design, Internet, MacUser, Media