A Need to Read

I like newspapers and magazines. I mean ‘real’ newspapers and mags, the physical type. I have problems with looking at text on screen and absorbing the information contained therein. It’s one of the reasons I like to turn pages of paper in a book rather than a collection of text on a device. I think a book is perfect for reading so I don’t ‘get’ why I would use a Kindull, a Hobo or whatever. I have tried but I don’t absorb the story or the content as well as I do when I ‘bury’ myself in a book. Odd perhaps but there you go.

I also like to leaf through a newspaper to have the stories laid out in front of me across a page, ordered and neat, ads placed out of the way or nicely breaking up the lay out of the page. I even like the occasional battle getting the pages to turn over without getting all messed up. My Saturday ritual has been for about 40 years to get up, shower, walk to the milk bar and buy The Age then read through it over a slow breakfast.

I don’t mind checking out headline stories on line but if I want to read a feature piece or a lot of stories I have to have a physical paper. I notice I am distracted far more easily reading something on line than if I read a paper which is interesting isn’t it?

It has been alarming to see how quickly newspapers and (to a lesser extent) newspaper have become diminished and are disappearing.   The Herald Sun seems to be doing better than the quality paper but it is a cut and paste paper in many ways with a few pages of local, freshly sourced content and the hideous sweeping generalisations of the adversarial Andrew Bolt plus some acidic Sydneysiders in their opinion pieces.  Fairfax on the other hand seems to have simply decided to let The Age wither away and the business model is to direct readers to online ‘services’ but hasn’t ensured advertising rates reflect the costs of providing content. Fairfax outsourced things like photo content, sub editors (well who knows if they even exist anymore), even printing. The Age is an amalgam of product from New Zealand, regional centres and probably Nauru. The wonderful Age printing works complex out on the Tullamarine airport only about a decade old will now lie empty. The historic Age building in Spencer Street has been demolished (I hear the old printing presses were still in the basement abandoned). The quality has gone, the content has reduced and they just sat back and let it happen and operated on the mantra ‘it’s a changing world’. Sales dropped but readership really didn’t. It wasn’t readers who have killed the Age, it’s the business model and letting advertising dollars slip away.  Duh.

Where does it leave journalists? There are a few, very few investigative journalists, McKenzie and Baker at the Age for instance, and they do a great job. The rest though have become reactive rather than going out and finding stories. Resources and numbers dictate that’s the way it will be from now on. There are reductions in bureaus so stories are sourced from other agencies and that can be fraught with inaccuracies or manipulations which once published become the ‘truth’. To fill pages the temptation is to grab a story from on line sources or ‘stories for sale’ banks. Sometimes they are badly written, sometimes they are simply dodgy but always they are depriving another journalist of an income and the readers from getting real news, stories that have been worked through, edited and are consistent with the values of a masthead. And of course if the tenor of content is a reflection of the newspaper’s owner or a particular political bias the credibility is surely affected. A paper isn’t necessarily playing the boss’s tune directly but if it’s taking its content from other paper’s in that boss’s stable then it will be arguably homogenous. It’s really a shame.

In London there are still about nine newspapers published daily and selling well, Hong Kong has three or four, New Zealand has a couple, the States are still strong and throughout Europe every country seems to be far better served than Australia and are still loyal to the ‘daily rags’. Interestingly media ownership is usually much more diverse in the countries where newspapers continue to do well. I doubt that sales are soaring anywhere but it seems they are maintaining levels. 

I suspect the Herald Sun will survive, the Australian will become a weekly and the Age will be published as a ‘digest’ one day through the week with a Weekend Age.

I shan’t abandon newspapers or my Saturday ritual. I will even occasionally read the Herald Sun and the Oz. I will continue to worry about journalists and their jobs.

But I just wonder if one day in the future a whole swag of people think to themselves ‘I think I’ll go back to buying a newspaper’ and there aren’t any there? Vinyl records are being sold again (and at a crazy expensive price), physical book sales increased last year (even a few new bookshops opened), there are several ‘phone only’ mobile phones available and ‘old fashioned’ sandwich shops are becoming popular.

Have to go now, the cryptic crossword awaits and then the cartoons.