I meant to pass this along a couple of weeks ago when the original news broke. You have probably seen it by now: literally, a printed newspaper of the previous day’s blog posts, launching in San Francisco and Chicago.
This merits all sorts of commentary and reporting, not even a fraction of which I could hope to compress in this space. (Here’s a sample, if you’re curious: NYT, Chicago Tribune.) But the Printed Blog appears to be one of those “Biosphere 2” type of moments, i.e., the first time we actually do something of this sort may not be a great execution of the idea; the thrill is that the idea was imagined and attempted in the first place.
Now, after trying to make up my mind about reading words on a page that were written for the screen ??? a little bit silly, that ??? this weekend there emerged another prospect showing how topsy-turvy our media really is. The New York Times, it is now being claimed, could make more money if it just ponied up the cash to buy all of its subscribers a Kindle.
Sounds preposterous, right? Well, ask yourself this: Is the Times in the journalism business or the paper and ink business? Clearly the former, but it subsidizes the latter, and at enormous cost. So why not stay in the same business, and subsidize a different platform? The comments to the above post lay out sundry objections and reasons for not doing this“but I can’t help but suspect that we’re going down this road whether we like it or not.
Now to take a completely different angle on this. Forget about the navel-gazing that surrounds journalism and ideas and platforms. I grew up in Detroit, and to grow up in Detroit and to witness its entropy over the past two decades is to learn a fundamental economic fact. No matter the product, things must be made. The most pulse-quickening concept cars are still welded from iron and steel, wired by cables and cords, outfitted with rubber and chrome and paint.
Likewise, today’s newspapers are printed in giant rooms by enormous presses with machinists at the controls. The papers are bound and stacked in trucks that are Teamster driven. The finished product is hawked on newsstands and tossed onto driveways and doorsteps by folks who likely work another one or two additional jobs. It might not be glamorous work, but it’s their paycheck. And just because they don’t have the mechanical engineering Master’s degree to design things like Kindles and PDAs doesn’t mean they’re not entitled to secure their livelihood.
I just wanted to throw that out there. I’m as curious as anyone about how we’ll read ??? and what we’ll be reading ??? two to five years down the line. But I’m equally curious about who will physically make the things we’ll read. My hunch is there won’t be enough Printed Blogs to employ everyone laid off when the city newspaper shuts down its presses.