This is a piece I wrote for the special SXSW edition put out by Newspaper Club earlier this year (previously referred to here). I met up with some old Guardian colleagues last night, and this came back into my mind… so I thought I’d republish it.
The first time I ever worked on a newspaper, I got fired within a week. In fact, I got fired despite the fact that I wasn’t even really working there: I was 15 years old and on a placement organised by a friendly teacher at my school.
Seriously, who gets fired from a job where they’re not even being paid?
The editor - a small, spherical man with a stubbly beard who I’ll call Colin (to be fair, his name *was* Colin) – called me into his office on Friday afternoon and gave me the bad news. The placement wasn’t working, he said. My attitude stunk. Don’t bother turning up on Monday.
I later discovered that he was irritated because I didn’t make him a cup of tea. So I turned up on Monday anyway and went back to my desk: proof you can’t get rid of me that easily.
More than fifteen years later I still avoid making the tea – much to the irritation of my colleagues - but I’m also still hanging around newspapers, having watched them endure probably the most turbulent decade in the history of the medium.
There’s no doubt that the internet has changed the way we think about the newspaper world. It’s exposed all of their flaws and weaknesses in horrible clarity, as if we suddenly reached for the remote and started watching in high definition. Their eccentric obsessions are more transparent, their frail business models are more apparent, and the gaps in their coverage more obvious than ever before.
Above all, though, newspapers just feel slow at what they always pretended was their main purpose: giving you the news. Too often they do little more than capture a snapshot of the headlines you read online yesterday, heard on the radio or watched on last night’s TV news.
The fact that now seems obvious is that newsprint was never a perfect package for delivering timely information – it was just the best one we had.
Many of the arguments made by newspapermen (and women) include a lot of misty-eyed guff about what makes the idea of them great in the first place. Most of the time they’re really just glorifying themselves, or the idea of journalism, or the concept of the newspaper - not the actual products they work on.
That’s no surprise: journalists in general are often myopic and lack a certain level of self-awareness that enables them to do their jobs. Reporters are usually even worse. Very few of us ever live up to the image we hold of ourselves as crusading gumshoes who speak truth to power: instead we usually operate as a dumb pack of hounds, chasing foxes but missing the wiliest ones.
That’s why many of them rail against the internet - all of the time missing what actually makes newspapers unique and valuable.
Despite what the critics say, what’s happening today is a reading revolution. There is more information and more reading than ever before - it’s just that it is happening in a vast number of new ways which we find difficult to measure.
The beauty of it all is that when different sorts of information can find their most efficient, effective methods of delivery, we’re liberated from having to squeeze our ideas into uncomfortable clothing. Instead, we can pick the right package for the right purpose, and give people what they want in specialised, highly-evolved ways. It’s Darwinian.
For example: the web is not only great for snacking on a buffet of fast, regularly updated information, but also for unfettered discovery and the ability to read at tangents. Tablet devices like the Kindle or the iPad, on the other hand, offer a more sedate, controlled version of the same idea – a more intimate, magazine-like experience.
We all know that the internet’s the most efficient, powerful mechanism for delivering information, but that doesn’t mean that it makes newsprint irrelevant. In fact, it’s a liberation that allows us to focus on what newspapers are really good at: understandable, highly portable, physical objects that make digesting certain kinds of information easier.
Like magazines, they can get you to read things you would never usually be interested in, simply through clever design decisions. Also, in a good way, they’re perishable. You can’t cut out and keep a computer screen, nor would you throw it in the recycling bin when you’re done.
Beyond all of these, there is one other thing that we should understand and respect about the newspaper: that it is a technology in itself.
A newspaper is a great big machine for delivering targeted slabs of information. The product comes out without fail on regular deadlines, changing drastically each time. It iterates faster than any web service. When it fails, it fails quickly, re-edits, reprints. It evolves.
Newspapers are always in beta.
Creating one – just like building anything – is a triumph of imagination and hard work. It’s a fast-moving, complicated jumble of ideas and information that you try to corral into a neat package. Once you’re done, and the files go to the printers, there’s an incredible sense of achievement. It only increases when you pick up the first copies that come off the press.
And if publishing a single issue is an astonishing feat of juggling, then just think what creating one every week or every day means - let alone making sure they get delivered across hundreds of miles before everybody gets out of bed.
That’s incredible, and worth using to your advantage. Yes: reading is changing, information is changing and newspapers are changing too. But when you look closely, all they’re doing is evolving into their higher selves so that we can do things better, not worse.
Colin - the grumpy editor who fired me despite the fact that I didn’t even work for him - didn’t really understand computers. A lonely, crusty Macintosh sat in the corner of his office, used only when necessary. But he understood the technology of newspapers, that sprawling, unfailing, relentless improvement machine.
The tragedy of the newspaper business is that he - and millions of others - didn’t realise it. Then again, he was too focused on getting a 15-year-old schoolboy to make him a cup of tea. Which, on point of principle, I never did.