Why Aren't Irish Newspapers More Concerned About the Revolution?

The newspaper industry is in flux. It may survive, or newspapers as we know them may go the same way as the town crier. Nobody really knows.

This is a worldwide phenomenon, the biggest change since Guttenberg, possibly, and no less revolutionary. The whole nature of how information is disseminated is changing. The internet has reduced venerable business models to rubble and so-called traditional media are fighting to adjust before they go belly-up.

How odd, then, that the Irish media seems so not-bothered about it all?

The panel on Karen Coleman’s Wide Angle show yesterday morning were clucking over the sparse coverage of the Polish air crash disaster in the Irish Sunday papers. How very insular, they said. It’s not like the didn’t have time, as the crash happened so early on Saturday, they said.

But the Irish media could never cover what happened in Poland. If you’re editor of the Sunday Independent, whom do you ask to write up an analysis of the role in 21st Century Polish life of President Lech Kaczynski or Slawomir Skrzypek, the head of the Polish national bank? Declan Lynch? Brendan O’Connor?

The Irish media are like the guests in Edgar Allen Poe’s Masque of the Red Death. There’s a man coming to visit, and they seem innocently or wilfully oblivious to the devastation he will wreak.

Mark Little tweeted an link yesterday to something Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, wrote about the iPad in today’s Observer, and how it could save the newspaper industry. Tech Crunch had a cheap dig, but they missed the most significant thing about the piece.

Rusbridger is the second major British media figure to come out and say that the iPad may save their industry. The first was Rupert Murdoch. The notion of anyone in the Guardian agreeing with Murdoch about anything is stunning. But this alliance between right and left shows just how parlous the state of newspapers is, and how close we could be to a whole new age of publishing.

A quarter of a century ago, when Murdoch broke SOGAT, the Fleet Street printers’ union, the newspaper business model was easy to understand. You had to print the paper, which took huge machines hours and hours of very expensive time. And then you had to put it in vans to ship it to whomever wanted to read it. But anybody who wanted to read it had to pay for it, and there was a second revenue stream of advertising as well. All neat and tidy.

But that’s all past tense now. Desktop publishing has sent hot metal printing the way of the dinosaur. You don’t need a fleet of vans now to deliver the product. All you need is a web server. Infinitely cheaper. Your prior cost model is now null and void. Equally, your chances of getting paid for gathering, processing and disseminating all this are zero too. It's a zero sum game. Everything is in freeflow.

What the newspaper product actually looks like the sticking point now, but Rusbridger’s argument is that the iPad may finally represent the ideal medium to view multi-media content.

When you watch media on You Tube you’re still in front of your computer. It feels like work. The iPad, according to Rusbridger, makes it feel like fun to a much wider audience than the techie mavens. And that’s what makes the iPad so potentially revolutionary.

How does this effect Ireland? Harder to say. For all this old yak about a knowledge economy, Ireland is very conservative in the way news is disseminated. Mattie McGrath, TD, is unlikely to suffer at the polls because he hasn’t been tweeting about headage payments to disadvantaged areas.

But it’s going to become increasingly difficult to justify spending two Euro a day on a newspaper when you can get more than a newspaper can possibly deliver from a device like the iPad. And what does that mean for the future of an independent Irish media, or who we inform ourselves about how the country is governed? And why isn’t anybody talking about it? Who’s that knocking on the door?





Technorati Tags: Ireland, culture, media,
newspapers, iPad, Alan Rusbridger, Rupert Murdoch

Pet Hate

Even Van Morrison likes the Sunday papers. There’s something so very – civilised – about them. Even the rags, the oaten husks among the nourishing porridge.

There is something soothing about the presence of the Sunday papers, the great, fat lumps of them, the majority of which were printed on Tuesday at the very latest. If any news happens on Saturday evening, your Sunday paper is the last place to find out about it. There’s no room left for news by the time they’ve stuffed in all that other stuff.

The newspaper industry is on its last legs. It’s soon to go the way of the telegraph and the valve television. The way we consume media evolves all the time, and what you’re reading now is the vanguard of that. The internet struck the first blow, but the real revolution are the 3G portable devices. iPhones, Apple’s new tablet if it happens, all these amazing devices that have shrunken the world to pocket-size leave the humble newspapers looking like rusty old steamships in the jet age.

But there’s a romance about those old steamships too, the great ocean-going liners. The papers are going, but they are not gone yet. And there remains a sense of adventure about going into a shop, and seeing what they all have to say on a particular morning, in their own particular ways.

Unless, of course, you go into a shop like the Spar visited by your constant quillsman, An Spailpín Fánach, yesterday. For some reason, a flock of clocking hens seem to have got loose in the shop – many miles from the own mileu, I can assure you – and attempted to nest among the flagships of the O’Reilly Empire.

Or else the shop was plagued with the sort of stupid, selfish swine that pokes his or her way around all the papers and then leaves them in a heap afterwards, with no consideration of the other people to come. These are the sort of people who do not flush toilets, spit on the street and fail to pray for Mother’s rest whenever they pass a churchyard. They are the scum and sweepings of the Earth, and An Spailpín Fánach wishes to God the world were rid of them.





Technorati Tags: Ireland, Dublin, newspapers, shopping