News Not Fit to Print

By Gerald McGrew on August 30, 2012 in Other

By the time you read this I suppose that Gina Reinhardt will be the President of Australia, there’ll be no such thing as a print newspaper and the discovery of the Boson-Higgs particle will have instantly turned ‘Back to the Future’ into a National Geographic documentary.

Yes, it’s been a crazy month. The world’s richest woman has launched and then unlaunched a bid to take control of Fairfax. In a scene reminiscent of an after school fight she called them names and waited for someone to throw a punch. Nothing happened, except the announcement of a couple of thousand job losses and some crazy ideas about maybe perhaps someday possibly a chance of Fairfax not printing newspapers one day.

And why kill off the humble newspaper? Here’s where the Internet comes in, nonchalantly wrecking the place like a 100-foot tall toddler, all smiley innocence and happily dribbling information while stomping long-established and eminently sensible business models like the print media game. The hard reality is this: more and more people read news online, and no one wants to pay for it when they do. This is old news. Then the iPad and other tablet devices were supposed to provide an alternative to paying for a printed newspaper. This was going to open up an exciting new world of digital revenue for our media barons and baronesses, who were getting understandably edgy about the threat the Internet posed to their rivers of cash. This too is relatively old news.

What is newer news is what has occurred after a year or two of these organisations trying to make us, the grubby want-everything-for-free public, actually pay to read the news online. With an alluring mix of spiffy iPad apps and clever subscription models (with the printed editions thrown in as part of the deal), we were meant to pay them about the same amount as we did to have the paper version that eventually graced the budgie cage. However, we’ve done the one thing that has stuffed all their plans royally: we simply Googled the news and read it for free from any of the other millions of sources. We’ve almost unanimously told them to piss off. The nerve of us!

While there have been millions of words postulating what will happen to the print media industry, I don’t have a clue. The elephant in the room is what will happen to journalistic quality as costs (and journos) are cut, while the 24-hour news cycle inexorably rolls on. There’s still a massive percentage of the population who want to buy a paper, and they’re not all in nursing homes or working on building sites. My dad will never take anything but the Sunday Herald into the loo after Mass. And he’ll never come out an hour later without crippling pins and needles.

Yet there’s a whole generation of spotty 18 year-olds who may never know the joy of locking themselves away from their screaming kids with a crisp unread newspaper and a new roll of toilet paper. Will they be paying for the news that they’ll no doubt be reading on a tablet device? More importantly, will their kids scream, and will they have pins and needles after that hour of solace?

I certainly hope so.