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Savoring the morning thunk
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Published: July 3, 2009
Back in March, Leonard Pitts of the Miami Herald wrote a column headlined, "Won't miss the newspaper? Think again". The occasion was the last print edition of the The Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
Pitts bought into the common view that porch papers all over are being done-in by the Internet, which stealthily snuck up on 'em, unobserved, over the past fifteen years.
As I've often written before, I don't buy that. The scenario I see is more like a guy calling girl-after-girl to ask for a date while never holding the phone to his ear and then wondering at home alone on Saturday nights why his social life lacks zest.
But let's not go there.
Instead, let's look ahead at the unhappy consequences of "thunkless" mornings, the journalistic analog of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.
There is one role that a daily print newspaper plays in society which no Internet surrogate is likely to fill. A daily paper causes a really big chunk of society to consider simultaneously a hand full of issues––irrespective of current preferences or beliefs, upbringing, gender, race, religious affiliation (or un-), age or other demographic variable whatever.
Whether they love or loathe an issue or its protagonist or its reporter, having it thrust upon their consciousness at the same time it's thrust upon the consciousness of several thousand of their neighbors, colleagues, cronies and workmates makes it probable that the issue will be discussed by significant numbers of people.
And some fraction of these will form an opinion, reverse an opinion, reconsider an opinion or be confirmed in an opinion as a result of having interacted with others.
It's like a choiceless, robotic cafeteria line where, on a given day, everybody in the line gets a sausage, a stalk of brocolli, a waffle and a Hostess Twinky. One day the kid just may try the brocolli, the health nut may loosen up and taste the Twinky, and Abe or Mahmud may even have a go at the sausage if they think no one's looking.
Now, the opposite of this scenario is the Internet-savvy culture.
The Internet cafeteria has whole lines with nothing but different kinds of sausage, other lines with fifty kinds of broccoli, brussels sprouts, kale and cauliflour but never meat, and never ever a Twinky of any stripe. And there's another line with more waffle wanna-be's than IHOP ever heard of. You get the picture.
Now, the good news is there's nothing to mechanically prevent anyone from going through several lines or picking different lines from time to time.
But the bad news is that people in the various types of lines get to know each other and they bond. It's human nature to prefer the familiar and form cliques so, over time, they venture into other lines less and less often.
The cliques become conscious of the fact that folks in other lines have implicitly rejected their brocolli or bratwurst and a certain resentment begins to permeate conversation within each kind of line. The veggie-liners are more and more certain they know just what those sausage-liners are all about and their lack of empathy with farm animals and Bambi begins to spark rumblings of disgust. And nobody likes the Twinky-liners, who are dismissed as effete and hedonistic.
The greatest peril I fear from thunkless mornings is the numb, gentle ease with which FAVORITE PLACES will funnel us daily into the same blogs. Faithful, obedient Google News and its Yahoo and FireFox robotic siblings will lead us not into novelty but deliver us from the other, the unfamiliar.
The sheer bulk and opportunity to access information that the Internet urges upon us almost forces us to become our own programmer-censors just to cope with the volume of it all.
For all its real or perceived bias, and for all the ideological and market-driven filtration limiting its variety, the daily paper still does a much better job of delivering a sample of the basic content "food groups" than we and our obedient electronic diet planners are ever likely to manage on our own if the paper goes away.
The Internet taken as a whole is––unlike a newspaper––a mindless technological artifact. To think that it or its proprietors have contrived to out-Darwin print journalism is naïve.
Some print dailies simply forgot who the real customer is. The real customer is not the company that gets the ad; not the investor who gets the dividend check; not the professional journalist who gets the rush from the scoop, from the tight, nicely turned copy or the occasional Pulitzer prize.
The real and forgotten customer is, and has always been, the one the First Amendment was crafted to serve; the one who gets the morning thunk.
Mooresville's Stan Thompson is a retired strategic planner and environmental futurist for BellSouth Telecommunications. His column appears every other week in the Tribune. Email him at: HST2nd@aol.com
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