[Mb-civic] Black and White and Dead All Over - Michael Kinsley - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Black and White and Dead All Over

By Michael Kinsley
Saturday, January 7, 2006; A17

Somewhere in the forest, a tree is cut down. It is loaded onto a giant 
truck and hauled a vast distance to a factory, where the trees is turned 
into huge rolls of paper. These rolls are loaded onto another truck and 
hauled another vast distance to another factory, where they are covered 
in ink, chopped up, folded, stacked, tied and loaded onto a third set of 
trucks, which fan out across cities and regions dropping bundles here 
and there.

Printing plants no longer have the clickety-clack of linotype machines 
and bubbling vats of molten lead. The letterpress machines that stamped 
the ink on the paper have been supplanted by offset presses that 
transfer it gently. There is computer-controlled this and that. 
Nevertheless, the process remains highly physical, mechanical, 
complicated and noisy. As we live through the second industrial 
revolution, your daily newspaper remains a tribute to the wonders of the 
first one.

Meanwhile, back to those bundles. Some of them are opened and the 
newspapers are put, one by one, into plastic bags. Bagged or unbagged, 
they are loaded onto a fourth set of vehicles -- bicycles by legend; 
usually, these days, a car or small truck -- and flung individually into 
your bushes or at your cat. Other bundles go to retail establishments. 
Still other newspapers are locked into attractive metal boxes bolted 
into the sidewalk. Anyone who is feeling lucky and happens to possess 
exact change has a decent shot at obtaining a paper or, for the same 
price, carting away a dozen.

What happens next is aided by a flat surface, especially on a Sunday 
near Christmas. The proud owner of up to four or five pounds of paper 
and ink begins searching for the parts he or she wants. The paper has 
multiple sections, each of which is either folded into others or wrapped 
around others according to an ancient formula known only to newspaper 
publishers and designed to guarantee that no one section can be found on 
the first go-through or removed without putting half a dozen other 
sections in play. Newspaper industry regulations do not require any 
particular labeling system for sections, but they do require that if 
letters are used, the sections cannot be in alphabetical order.

And so, at last, there are two piles of paper: a short one of stuff to 
read, and a tall one of stuff to throw away. Unfortunately, many people 
are taking the logic of this process one step further. Instead of buying 
a paper in order to throw most of it away, they are not buying it in the 
first place.

Bill Gates says that in technology, things that are supposed to happen 
in less than five years usually take longer than expected, while things 
that are supposed to happen in more than 10 years usually come sooner 
than expected. Ten years ago, when I went to work for Microsoft, the 
newspaper industry was in a panic over something called Sidewalk -- a 
now-forgotten Microsoft project to create Web site entertainment guides 
for a couple dozen big cities. Newspapers were convinced that Microsoft 
could and would put them out of business by stealing their ad base. It 
didn't happen. The collapse of the Internet bubble did happen. And, 
until very recently, the newspapers got complacent. Some developed good 
Web sites and some didn't, but most stopped thinking of the Web as an 
imminent danger.

Ten years later, newspapers are starting to panic again. But merely 
slobbering after bloggers may not be enough. In 1996 the oldest 
Americans who grew up with computers and don't even understand my 
tiresome anecdotes about how people used to resist them ("What's a 
typewriter, Mike?") were just entering adulthood. Now they are most of 
the working population, or close to it.

The trouble even an established customer will take to obtain a newspaper 
continues to shrink, as well. Once, I would drive across town if 
necessary. Today, I open the front door and if the paper isn't within 
about 10 feet I retreat to my computer and read it online. Only six 
months ago, that figure was 20 feet. Extrapolating, they will have to 
bring it to me in bed by the end of the year and read it to me out loud 
by the second quarter of 2007.

No one knows how all this will play out. But it is hard to believe that 
there will be room in the economy for delivering news by the Rube 
Goldberg process described above. That doesn't mean newspapers are 
toast. After all, they've got the brand names. You gotta trust something 
called the "Post-Intelligencer" more than something called "Yahoo" or 
"Google," don't you? No, seriously, don't you? Okay, how old did you say 
you are?

And newspapers have got the content. The first time I heard myself 
called a "content provider," I felt like a guy who'd been hired by the 
company that makes Tupperware to make sure there was plenty of Jello 
salad. As a rule, anyone who uses the term content provider without a 
smirk needs to consider getting content from someone else.

There is even hope for newspapers in the very absurdity of their current 
methods of production and distribution. What customers pay for a 
newspaper doesn't cover the cost of the paper, let alone the attendant 
folderol. Without these costs, even zero revenue from customers would be 
a good deal for newspapers, if advertisers go along. Which they might. 
Maybe. Don't you think? Please?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/06/AR2006010601495.html?nav=hcmodule
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