print

There’s much anticipation for Apple’s announcement today out in California about a new super secret insanely great killer hardware. Leaks by McGraw-Hill CEO have confirmed eBook capabilities and other sources revealed TV tuner, PVR, and videoconferencing features. This is sort of along the lines of my speculations:: “I’m thinking this new offering will be a hybrid that will be more like an iTouch that ideally offers users tools for the better management of and experiences with media—of all digitized forms,” but it’s still all speculation.

One implication that’s being focused on is how this new Apple tablet {some have dubbed it the “Jesus tablet”} could save the ailing print publishing industry, as newspapers and magazines struggle to remain relevant in the era of searchable digitized content. Will the Jesus tablet {or something like it} save publishing and what are the implications for the field of professional journalism, i.e., the fourth estate?  The business model of newspapers and magazines was simple. Create content that drives subscriptions that allows selling of adspace. The Internet allowed easy access to searchable digitized content and consumers just didn’t want to pay for it, from day one. Ad revenues at newspapers and magazines declined. Craigslist made matters worse with electronic classifieds further eroding revenues. McKinsey quantified the price destruction of the Internet and discusses paywalls as a avenue for some. While revenues dwindled, so did the staffs of newsrooms and magazine offices. Some night argue that citizen bloggers are filling the void and that “good enough” information is readily available free of charge.

Will a tablet that makes accessing multimedia content a snap, if indeed Apple delivers such a device, bring revenues that will enable journalists to get paid? I’m not so sure. The iPod is a triumph of usability. It creates a great user experience and a platform for MP3 sales and while it has spurred strong Internet sales growth, the revenues aren’t enough to offset declining sales of CDs. The iPhone creates a great user experience for telephony, texting, and the mobile web, creating a platform for apps, $3B US in apps as of this month. The steep subsidies in the US for the iPhone have hampered the sole carrier’s earnings, AT&T.

Apple is great at creating platforms, built around great user experience regarding digital content, that benefit them—for now. I think digital music and mobile communications are in a dynamic and turbulent trajectory and I see social media being a major decentreing force. Newspapers and magazines will need to rethink their business models and their relationship with content, pricing, and intellectual property enforcement.

Publishers need to look at new tools like the Apple tablet as a multimedia platform for their content that allow for contextual ads. Some industry analysts are on the same page::

“There’s a real opportunity for Apple to raise the bar here…
Not only by making digital publications accessible to the mainstream reader, but also seamlessly interweaving online features, apps and streaming audio/video content to enhance the general reading experience.” —Scott Steinberg, Digitrends.com Analyst

I feel that content is a “loss leader.” The music industry is coming to terms with this. Sales from the music are secondary to the brass rings of tours, merch, and licensing for TV shows and films. Over on Loudpaper, Mimi Zeiger made an interesting observation::

“What’s become more clear to me over the last year as more and more titles close, is that a publication can’t rely only on the stakes and rigging of print, nor is the move to a digital format as surefire fix. But maybe embracing publishing as pure folly—that is, as spectacle, as event—can offer a worthwhile model. Magazines like GOOD take an integrated approach, content is online as well as in print, and it hosts events based its featured subjects. It also has the good sense to team with other titles, like Readymade, to build cross branding and robust content.”

I couldn’t agree more. Once a path to cash can be mapped for publishers, then we can tend to our code blue patient, the profession of journalism.

Twitterversion:: Leaks about #Apple’s new gadget pt to multimedia tablet w/eBook & videoconf. Can print publishers leverage this platform @Prof_K

“There is ONE medium.”

Will that be the forthcoming declarative utterance to end all utterances?  If so, let me be one of the first few to coin it.

There has been a lot of buzz on web versus print with Clay Shirky  (Shoutout to Temporaryversion) discussing the business implications of old models struggling to deal with new ones.  (Here’s an example by Shirky on why newspapers cannot adopt a iTunes-like model).  I see one of the key challenges as culture, in that (North)American culture is one of what I call “quick cuts and remix.”  You see this in talk of convergence culture and Jenkins’s book, which describes instances of the modalities and materialities (Pfeiffer) of media combining.  We see in our everyday lives the Internet is taking over TV viewing time and also offering up viewing of broadcast TV/radio shows.  We can read books online or on handheld devices like Kindle hooked to databases.  Advertising and product placement are becoming more and more ubiquitous, so that this will be not so far-fetched.  [ThickCulture is brought to you by Contexts.  Cutting-edge content provided free of charge by the American Sociological Association]

We “scan” and read “at” things.  If we (or our attention spans) are pinched for time, we get information by reading the Yahoo headlines, not the article.  We are promiscuous in our media habits and don’t want to pay for things we don’t feel we should pay for.

Enter Walter Benjamin & Roger Chartier.  Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction   (full text here) in my opinion is central to understanding what’s going on.  If we look at media content as “art,” a pattern emerges:

“An analysis of art in the age of mechanical reproduction must do justice to these relationships, for they lead us to an all-important insight: for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the “authentic” print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics.”

Two things.  I think that content isn’t emancipated from ritual, but rather that new rituals and culturally-driven patterns of praxis (i.e., drivers of meaning) are created, often in unpredictable ways.  Media content can now be taken and repurposed.  The mashup is a perfect example, along with user-driven meanings in Web 2.0.  The reference to politics as a basis is a nod to Benjamin’s Marxism.  I believe that media content and art now are squarely in the realm, not of politics, but of the political economy, specifically in terms of inter/actions in markets.  

Roger Chartier in The Order of Books notes that in studying print capitalism, in order to understand it within a cultural context, we need to address (1) the text (content), (2) the book (media), and (3) reading practices.  There has been a lot of attention on the first two, but less solid understanding on the reading of media.  What Jenkins teaches us through his thick description of the current media milieu is that the lines between media are blurring.  We see it in the modes and materialities, but also in the economics.  I feel we are moving towards a singularity of media.  For example, some will say print and broadcast TV are both dead, as both will soon be killed by the web.  That’s the wrong way of thinking.  This assumes a linearity akin to upshifting a manual transmission.

In terms of media praxis, success will often be about creating models of how media can be intertwined to create value.  Take any pop culture figure, such as Lindsay Lohan.  She’s in film, she’s a singer, a celebrity newsmaker and tabloid fodder, and the butt of the satirists’ joke (see left).  The Internet is moving towards collapsing all paths to Lindsay into a single LindsayÜberstraße, a vertitable autobahn of linked Web 2.0 content.

I think it is telling that the Journalism School at CUNY, which is earning a reputation for being on the leading edge, is no longer requiring students to commit to a media track.  Additionally, with integrated market communications (IMC), there will be increasing market-based pressures to view media as one.  A future post will grapple with the Deleuzean idea of singularity and how it applies to media.  I think we need to address how people are “reading” all media in this Web 2.0 age.  Why?  We finally might get a handle on figuring out how the new technologies will specifically transform culture, economics, and society.

Is print dead?  What about the demise of the Fourth estate, perhaps a linchpin of democracy?  Well, someone else said this, not me, but I’m more interested in good journalism than newspapers.  The problem is that newspapers and the  news media are often tied to economic imperatives, which is (in my opinion) a historical trajectory that is by no means set.  We need to think about content in the age of infinite replication, which makes Benjamin such an important figure.

My friend Mimi Zeiger at Loudpaper blogged about the state of print.  I think it’s important to think about the implications of the functions of journalism and publishing and how these will be manifested, as media goes singular.  I personally feel a certain fondness for actual printed work.  It may have more to do with the specific æsthetics of the medium than anything and possibly the tactile experience.

• Do you think it’s useful to think of media as singular?
• What is the future of print?

For those who feel they have something important to say, I’ll leave you with the following, a portrait of Miranda July.