Sunday, November 30, 2008
The Serenity of an Old Hack
There was a depressing piece about the decline of newspapers in the FT and, today, there's an even more depressing piece on the same subject by Maureen Dowd in the NYT. In fact, neither article mentions one of the most ominous developments for papers - the sudden rise of the netbook. Online newspapers have been held back by portability. Phones are too small and laptops too large and expensive to compete with the dead tree product. Netbooks are small, light, cheap and flying out of the box shops in Tottenham Court Road. They fit in the inside pocket of a Barbour (I tried yesterday). Assuming wireless connectivity becomes commonplace and free in the near future, netbooks or something similar will do yet more damage to circulations. This will accelerate the inevitable cull of titles, leaving only a few upmarket papers - downmarket ones already do not make sense - that can charge for online access. In this climate I console myself that it's better to be an old hack than a young one and even better, of course, to be an upmarket one.
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
I know the feeling, Bryan. i.e. I feel quite glad to be old, too, in a job that has similarities to yours.
ReplyDeleteremember these wise words: 'Age and guile beat youth, innocence, and a bad haircut' (P. J. O'Rourke)
ReplyDeleteThe only fly in the ointment is that the netbook has taken the big boys by surprise. Microsoft didn't see it coming and their latest operating system, Vista, is too unwieldy to work on netbooks. Apple have damned the whole idea with faint praise, perhaps because they aren't sure of how to react. And Intel has been bitching about netbooks because they had other, grander plans for their new Atom processor. So we can thank some Asian outfits for this bit of disruptive innovation, but don't rule out the big Western IT companies trying to stamp out netbooks. The mobile outfits are none too keen on wifi either, for obvious reasons. The IT industry knows it can make more money selling us ludicrously expensive and unreliable "smart phones" and the bigger, more standard sizes of laptops. FWIW, Samsung netbooks seem to be very highly regarded. I am tempted.
ReplyDeleteA large part of the problem, outside of technological questions, is that so many newspapers are shit, or if not totally shit, then mostly shit. I'm not sure if even the best newspaper (whatever it might be) escapes that latter category.
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