To quote the Slovenian artist Vuk Ćosić (one of the pioneers of net. art), an essential question may well be: Is a hard copy obsolete?73 This was the title of an essay which Ćosić published in the late 1990s on the subject of networked art - a title which itself provocatively questions the human attachment to the tangible, in contrast with the development of various new communication strategies in networked environments. A decade later, we can say with certainty that print has not (yet) become obsolete. But it does seem to be in a period of profound mutation, mainly because of how the electronic screen is already taking over several of the functions of paper. This transitional phase has been predicted ever since the early days of the Web, and was described as being in effect the “Late Age of Print” by Jay David Bolter in his book Writing Space.74 Whenever it seems that a newer, more powerful technology is about to change the established rules of a system, then that entire system tends to gradually produce a counterreaction. In the 1940s for example, when the introduction of the first facsimile machine prototypes was sending waves of apprehension throughout the newspaper industry, the Canadian Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences wrote in a report to its members:
"The vigorous brief of the Canadian Daily Newspapers Association was devoted entirely to a discussion of the consequences to the present newspaper business if the new device of facsimile broad-casting should become, as seems possible, an effective and popular rival to newspapers as we know them… this development will attract newcomers to the newspaper field, and that the facsimile reader will be able in his home to dial any one of several newspa-pers just as now he tunes his receiving set to radio programmes."75
But this time around, the development of networked digital media is happening faster than most observers had predicted.
Chapter 3
3.1 The Mass Slaughter Of Newspapers
In 1981 in the San Francisco Bay Area, two newspapers (the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner) experimented with making their (text) content available for download by modem, and advertised this new service in full-page ads; of the estimated two to three thousand home-computer users in the Bay Area, more than 500 sent in the coupon requesting more information. Participating users were especially enthusiastic about the possibility of copy-pasting news content. In a KRON-TV news report on this experiment, the reporter Steve Newman imagined the future: “A day will come when we'll get all of our newspapers and magazines by home computers. But that's a few years off.” The news anchorwoman concluded: “But it takes over two hours to receive the entire text of a newspaper over the phone, and with an hourly charge of five dollars the new 'telepaper' would not be much competition for the 20 cents street edition”.76 Which goes to show just how radically the economics of the "tele-paper" have changed since then (and particularly since the mid-00s).
In February 2007, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of the New York Times, announced: “I really don't know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don't care either.”77 This statement was more or less instantly quoted (and endlessly repeated) by online news media platforms of every kind, seeing here a sign from God that their dream of many years was finally materialising. But what Sulzberger was actually saying was that within five years, the New York Times would be ready to switch to a digital-only business model.
And yet just one year later, the plummeting of circulation and ads sales, combined with the economic crisis, would force a number of historically significant mid sized U.S. newspapers (some of which had been publishing for more than a century) to stop printing - in some cases switching to a web-only format.
These included the Seattle Post-Intelligencer,78 the Christian Science Monitor,79 the Capital Times,80 the Ann Arbor News,81 the Rocky Mountain News,82 and the Tucson Citizen.83 Others have cut down the number of editions to only a few days each week, or re-sorted to a free-distribution busi-ness model (such as the Evening Standard in the U.K.84) in order to maintain their circulation figures. And a number of iconic world newspapers, such as the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, are barely surviving, chronically seek-ing injections of new capital to help
them survive beyond their current print-based business model. And the vultures are quickly circling in. Marc Andreessen (founder of Netscape, and now on the board of both EBay and Facebook) publicly assessed the situation in these harsh terms: “You talk to any smart investor who controls any amount of money… There is no value in these stock prices attributable to print anymore at all. It's gone.”
According to Jimmy Wales, co-founder and figurehead of Wikipedia: “It isn't that reading is going out of style - quite the oppo-site. It isn't that people don't care about quality '' quite the opposite. The death of the traditional magazine has come about because people are demanding more information, of better quality, and faster.”86 And Philip Meyer, in his book The Vanishing Newspaper makes the plausible prediction, based on statistics of newspaper readership in America from the 1960s to the present day, that if the current trend continues, newspaper readership in U.S. will be exactly zero by the first quarter of 2043.
The idea of the newspaper as an 'endangered species' was also the concept of an art exhibition titled The Last Newspaper,88 held at the New Museum in New York in October 2010 and co-curated by Richard Flood and Benjamin Godsill. The exhibition featured artworks which have examined, questioned, and made use of newspapers since the 1960s; here the newspaper comes across as an object and a medium whose aesthetic status seems to belong to some undefined past, rather than to the present.
And what does Google, which enjoys a near-monopoly of the online search market, have to say about the problems currently facing news-papers? Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO, replied in an interview:
“We have a mechanism that enhances online subscriptions, but part of the reason it doesn't take off is that the culture of the Internet is that information wants to be free…
We'd like to help them better monetize their customer base… I wish I had a brilliant idea, but I don't. These little things help, but they don't fundamen-tally solve the problem.”89
Meanwhile, Google's current business model of cashing in (through its online services such as Google News) on free news published by oth-er sites, is increasingly being called into question by traditional editors. Robert Thomson, an editor of the Wall Street Journal, indignantly characterised such content aggregators as “parasites or tech tapeworms in the intestines of the Internet”.90 But it's clear that the price of information has dropped. As Clay Shirky, Assistant Arts Professor at New York University's graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program, anticipated in 1995:
“The price of information has not only gone into free fall in the last few years, it is still in free fall now, it will continue to fall long before it hits bottom, and when it does whole categories of currently lucrative businesses will be either transfigured unrecognizably or completely wiped out, and there is nothing anyone can do about it.”919
Which is why a brilliant 2009 April Fools' Day announcement, explaining that the highly respected British news-paper, the Guardian, had decided to switch entirely to Twitter, could sound even remotely plausible.
What then can save the newspapers? The German advertising creative direc-tor Marc Schwieger shocked an audience at a major newspaper conference by telling them openly that they should concentrate their efforts on becom-ing the medium that prints “yester-day's news”. He also believes that, if the Apple/iTunes paradigm is indeed going to become the new standard, then newspapers can learn a valuable survival lesson from the music industry: how to compensate for the loss of traditional sources of in-come (CD sales, print circulation) by focusing on 'special' and 'quality' products (in the case of the music industry, live concerts). For printed newspapers, the equivalent of the 'unique experience' of the live con-cert is probably the thick weekend edition - longer articles and more sophisticated content, focusing less on real-time news and more on analysis, comment and reflection.
The problem of immediate obsolescence (news becomes 'old' as soon as it is printed) is of course nothing new. Interestingly, the very same problem also applies to printed publications dealing with Internet resources, referencing web addresses which may very well be 'dead' by the time the book is published. But for newspapers, this is quickly becoming a flaw of historical proportions, increasingly undermining what has been their main role for generations. This shift was eloquently expressed in Old News,92 an art installation by Michael Mandiberg. Every morning, the artist arrived at the gallery space with a stack of (fresh) copies of the New York Times, with the words “Old News” cut out by laser in huge letters. The pile of now-unreadable newspapers steadily grew, symbolically demonstrating the worthless-ness of stacks of unsold or unread copies.