Recently, in between attending weddings and experimenting with facial hair (there's a reason why none of the weddings I've been attending is my own...) I've been having the Journalist Discussion.
Y'know, that journalist discussion: the one where, upon meeting people who work in terribly 21st-century technological-style industries, somebody asks: "But isn't your entire line of work going to be, like, dead in about a year's time anyway?"
Which, as well as being somewhat hard to answer with any degree of
certainty - if you'd have asked me ten years ago whether we'd be facing
news reports of something rather cheerily calling itself
Perfect Storm 2030,
I'd have definitely said "probably not" - is a little dispiriting. I
mean, I love magazines. I wouldn't be working at a career in them if I
didn't, and if I didn't have some kind of faith in their continued
existence.
Because here's the thing: I don't think media
necessarily needs to kill other media. In the 1950s, when television
was the next big thing, movie executives were afraid everyone would
stop going to see films in theatres. And, fair enough, cinema takings
are down, but it's taken forty years to get there. And, in any case,
I'd argue that what's on offer are two different experiences: there's
the films I definitely would want to see on a massive, shared screen,
and those I'd rather watch in the comfort of my own home.
The
same with the internet and magazines and newspapers. Yes, I can now
read the news in a vast array of different ways: on a screen at my
desk, on a screen on my phone, and on a page stapled to some other
pages in a magazine. But it's this stapling that makes me want to come
back to the magazine: somebody, somewhere has
chosen to staple
those pages, with that specific content, together because they'll think
I'll like it. Someone's selecting content. And they're selecting
content that they think is good.
Because the internet isn't
content: it's a form of content transmission. People will, I'd like to
think, always come back to content that's well-written, well-designed;
not because of any snobbery on my part, but because that's what I think
is most important. There's certainly a buzz to be had out of getting
content
now, on shiny tactile new platforms, but I won't keep coming back to it unless it's well put together.
That's
not to say there's not a lot of amazing content on the internet.
There's loads of it. In the past week alone I've read fantastic
articles on
the death of another medium, the album, and a piece on
what the internet should be for,
that made me both want to hug the author and start writing properly
again. Both of those I'd have been happy to pay money for. Both could
only have been published that easily, that immediately, on the
internet. I don't think the two things are mutually exclusive; so long
as I have the small amount of disposable income I need, I'll still go
out and buy words written on bits of paper stapled together.