Advertisments

Feature

Stop the Killing

Is Print Dying at the Hands of Evolution or The Grim Reaper?

by Nina L. Diamond

Life is full of injustices. Either they bother you or they don’t. Me they bother. - Anne Bancroft, in the film Garbo Talks

For a long time, I felt like The Grim Reaper.

Throughout the 1990s and this first decade of the 2000s, it seemed that I’d show up just in time to witness the last, dying gasps of a magazine.

I’d write an article or become a regular contributor and, pretty soon, SPLAT! The publication would drop dead.

I was beginning to take it personally.

After all, these were very healthy publications, very successful, well-known, high profile, award-winning paragons of journalism.

So, how come everything I touched turned to shit?

Local and regional magazines. National magazines. Newspapers’ Sunday magazines and other special sections. All dead.

Did I have the worst case of bad timing, or what?

I felt much better when, not long ago I read an article by a journalist who had been through the same thing…30 and 40 years before me!

He, too, had felt like The Grim Reaper. In the 1950s and ‘60s he’d write for some terrific magazine or newspaper, and then BOOM! They’d drop dead.

And, that’s when I got it: This is evolutionary.

Great magazines and great newspapers die in cycles and it has nothing to do with me (well, obviously, I really already knew that), or him (and he really knew that, too), and it’s never because these publications aren’t worthy, and it’s almost never because they’re not economically sound.

Like animals who eat their young, publishing gobbles up its own. Market forces kill magazines, newspapers, and book publishers all the time. Greed and creepy accounting murders them, too. Some commit suicide. In all cases, it’s never fair to those who write for them and those who love to read them.

And it’s always a loss for a city, a state, a country. For a culture. For journalism and book publishing. For the health of a democracy.

Some of these instances are the result of a natural evolution, some the result of a forced evolution, like the one that print media and book publishing are going through now.

For a little context, think of it this way: When your 95-year-old Grandpa dies of natural causes, it’s sad, but not tragic or inherently unfair. But, when anyone of any age is murdered or commits suicide, well, that’s a whole ‘nother kettle of printer’s ink.

As greed, stupidity, short-sightedness, mismanagement and God-knows-what-else take their fatal toll on books, magazines, and newspapers, and the people who create them, read them, and rely on then, we scramble to make sense of it all, and some of us scramble to stop the killing.

As Albert Einstein famously said, “No problem can be solved from the same consciousness that created it.”

We can’t look to the industry morons and monsters who caused the problem. They’re not the ones who can fix it.

And they’re certainly not going to tell the truth about what’s really going on.

As Winston Churchill said, “Men stumble over the truth from time to time, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened.”

The actor Harvey Fierstein said (and perhaps he was quoting someone else, I don’t know), “A problem is never as permanent as a solution.”

The solutions we’ve been witnessing of late bear that out. I’ve stopped counting the number of newspapers that have been murdered or committed suicide in recent months, including those who’ve stopped printing and are now just online.

It’s becoming easier to just count the newspapers that are left.

If you want to know what’s really at the bottom of this mess, consider this famous quote from novelist Upton Sinclair (1878-1968): “It is difficult to get people to understand something when their salaries depend upon their not understanding it.”

* * * * *

Nina L. Diamond is a journalist, essayist, and the author of Voices of Truth: Conversations with Scientists, Thinkers & Healers. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including Omni, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, and The Miami Herald.

---