“ My admittedly strange opinion is that we need to try harder with print. We can’t just give up on it. Inevitably there will be some loss of newspaper readership, but even that will stabilize. Not everyone wants all their news online. Do we all want to look at screens from 8am to 10pm? There’s room in the world for both online and paper. It doesn’t have to be zero-sum. I guess that’s one of the things that’s always frustrating to hear, that the rise of the Internet means the death of print. There’s always this zero-sum way of painting any given industry or trend, while the reality will be more nuanced. I think newspapers that adjust a bit will survive and still do great work. But we do need to give people reasons to pay money for the physical object. The landscape right now does require that we in the print world try harder. We have to think of the things that print does best, and do those things better than ever before. We need to use the paper, maximize the physical product.”
Maybe because I’m involved in both worlds, but again and again I can’t help but grasp the parallels between the music industry and the newspaper industry. Like in this quote by Dave Eggers, I can clearly see one way the latter can go.
Mp3s did not kill the CD. Hell, the CD didn’t even kill vinyl like everyone said it would. Sure, sales of both have gone down, which was inevitable when a non-material format was introduced that could be replicated indefinitely for free. But people buy vinyl for the sound, buy CDs for the artwork, buy either because they’re collectors or because they want to get the band’s autographs at the concert or for any number of reasons that translate to sales of physical products.
The same can be said for newspapers and books. How many people bought a copy of their local paper the day Obama was elected? Hell, mine is still hanging over my desk at work. How many people buy a new copy of a book they already own because a new edition has come out with a different cover and new forward by the author? Maybe not enough to single-handedly keep the industry afloat, but enough to ensure that print will not simply disappear overnight.
Like the obsessive record collector with shelves of alphabetically arranged vinyls, the obsessive bookworm will continue purchasing books. The obsessive news junkie will keep savoring the daily trip to the newsstand. But the industries need to adapt to a model when these people are a minority, not the majority. They need to be profitable, to be able pay musicians and journalists and editors based on a digital model, while still producing the physical objects for those who want to purchase them. It’s never going to be black or white, print or digital - the model needs to encompass both, but in different degrees than it has ever done before in the past.
