This is how you kill a newspaper
My first year at Oberlin, my friends and I had a little ritual. Every Friday, we’d pick up a crisp copy of the OBERLIN REVIEW, open it to “The Review Security Notebook,” and look for signs of ourselves.
8:18 p.m. Officers and the Oberlin Fire Department responded to a fire alarm at Dascomb Hall. The cause of the alarm was found to be smoke from a dirty stove top. The alarm was reset.
We’d laugh and say, “When is Margaret going to learn how to cook?” before cutting out the notice and pinning it to the cork board. It started off as only a couple of clips. By the end of the year, the board was covered.
Richard Rodriguez, writing in HARPER’S, says that “newspaper is something of a misnomer.” Indeed, newspapers don’t simply give news; they act as a “record of a city’s mundane progress,” full of wedding announcements, bankruptcy notices, weather forecasts, fire department logs, and high school basketball scores. “A newspaper’s morgue,” he writes, “was scrutable evidence of the existence of a city.”
It goes without saying that the REVIEW, Oberlin College’s paper of record, didn’t report on births and deaths and weddings and the weather — at least not that often. But you would find sports scores, a list of who has come to talk, recitals and plays and general goings on about town. The REVIEW, every week, was scrutable evidence of the existence of Oberlin. And, every week, the list of infractions in the Security Notebook was scrutable evidence of the existence of Oberlin’s students. I suppose that, as much as anything else, is why we made those clippings: They were a sign, however small, however silly, that we existed. And somehow, the fact that someone would take the time to make some record of our existence made us feel like we were a part of something — not just that we existed, but that we existed in community with others.
Newspapers are dying. But not just their bodies whither; the souls of papers — their cultures — are dying, too:
In the nineteenth-century newspaper, the relationship between observer and observed was reciprocal: the newspaper described the city; the newspaper, in turn, was sustained by readers who were curious about the strangers that circumstance had placed proximate to them. […] We no longer imagine the newspaper as a city or the city as a newspaper.
I doubt that anyone at Oberlin would admit that they think of the REVIEW as Oberlin, or Oberlin as the REVIEW. But the newspaper we constructed from the snippets we read of all the myriad publications, official and unofficial — sanctioned and unsanctioned — was my Oberlin. Now, I subscribe on larks. HARPER’S comes once a month. So does the ATLANTIC. THE NEW YORKER comes weekly. JACOBIN comes whenever it feels like it. It’s too much and it’s not enough. I miss the place-ness of the REVIEW, but when my partner and I tried the CHICAGO TRIBUNE, we didn’t last more than a week.
I am killing the newspaper. Or, more charitably, we are killing the newspaper. Or, more charitably still, the internet is killing the newspaper. It becomes ever more inhospitable to the quaint notions of locality and community the dead-tree newspaper represents. But, of course, it’s not just hard news that is waning. I have less and less time for the printed magazines I receive. I am drawn more and more to the stream — that space online where there is no locale, there is no past or future, there is no community except me. I wrote recently that “Mostly, I get my news from Twitter. If I don’t look at the headline or the logo, it’s easy to mistake the actual content of FUSION for MIC or FIVETHIRTYEIGHT for VOX.” The contextless stream that I inhabit would seem so unrecognizable to the version of myself who admired the REVIEW’s Security Notebook.
Or maybe not. It’s not uncommon to find an article, like an immovable stone in a brook, shaping the water as it passes by. I’m thinking here about work that finds its unlikely purchase — the kind of work I want to read and write. These are the pieces that produce engagement rather than mere clicks, the kinds that anchor my thoughts for a while. The kind that give me hope.
“The badness of the worst we do,” Marilynne Robinson writes in the most recent issue of HARPER’S, “does not diminish the goodness of the best we do. That our best is so often artistic rather than utilitarian is a truth with which we should learn to be at peace.” As with many important truths, Robinson’s words inspire both hope and more than a little discomfort. Much of my job revolves around tracking how users interact with Quartz online. I spend a lot of time, then, thinking about metrics. I am sorely tempted, in my hubris, to believe that my measurements can tell us the story of a piece — if not the whole story, then at least the important parts of it. After all, the progress narrative we tell ourselves is, at its core, a story of measuring things. Start with a foot — based on the human body; end with a laser-leveled, digital caliper. Start with circulation rates; end with HTTP cookies and click-tracking. Certainly, there’s utility in these ever more precise ways of measuring. But the dumb, wooden ruler is just as effective as the most sophisticated AI algorithm in telling us how good a piece of writing is — which is to say, not very effective at all.
Today, the ideology of naturalism reigns. We are all like Hamlet’s Horatio, with nothing in heaven or earth except what our sciences dream up. The Logical Positivists, who claimed that language was only “significant” when it was in the form of a “verifiable” statement, spring to mind. So too do the big data wranglers of Silicon Valley: as they quest to algorithm away problems, they promise to algorithm away our humanity as well. Of course, naturalism serves us well when employed, say, in the sciences. But it ought to serve us; all too often, our endeavors have begun to serve it, which is probably what Christians mean when they warn against idolatry.
Newspapers aren’t on the wane only because their ad revenues are in steep decline. That’s a symptom. No, our culture — both IRL and online — ails us, and newspapers are just another failing organ. And, alas, our infection is autoimmune. It attacks the very structures that fight off disease: namely art.
“In the growling gray light (San Francisco still has foghorns), I collect the San Francisco Chronicle from step,” Rodriguez writes. “I am so lonely I must subscribe to three papers — the WALL STREET JOURNAL, the NEW YORK TIMES, the SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE. I remark their thinness as I climb up the stairs. The three together equal what I remember.”
I’ve found myself subscribing to the email newsletters of journalists I like. “It’s like a magazine delivered to your inbox,” I explained to my partner. The truth is I, too, am lonely. We’re all lonely, which makes it all the sweeter when we clamor out of the stream, panting for breath, and allow ourselves to read.
