"I have seen the future, and it works."
That's a paraphrase from Lincoln Steffens, an American journalist who, upon his return from a 1921 visit to the newly born Soviet Union, enthused over the efficiency of a society based upon state compulsion.
We now know how that all turned out.
But that Steffens quotation came to mind when I dropped in on an April 2 "community meeting" organized by the three principals of AnnArbor.com, the successor to the soon-to-be-defunct Ann Arbor News, which announced that it would cease publication in July.
In the same way traditional journalist Steffens misjudged the true nature of the Soviet regime, traditional journalism as a whole has misjudged the changing nature of the craft and the market for it.
Economic reality is now forcing the hands of many newspapers, not just the Ann Arbor News. The bottom line – and the average age of the audience at the AnnArbor.com forum supported this conclusion – is that almost nobody under the age of 40 really reads newspapers anymore. They still get news, but they've abandoned the local "fishwrapper" in droves.
Much to their credit, AnnArbor.com's principals, Matt Kraner, Tony Dearing, and Laurel Champion (pictured above), clearly understand that the old business model is unsustainable. The $64,000 question, of course, is: What model is sustainable? Or put another way: What do people want, how can we deliver it to them, and how can we make it profitable to do so?
Most of the audience questions at the forum were naturally posed by the older folks and seemed to focus on what I would consider peripheral issues. If I could loosely summarize them in a single pithy question, it would be something like "I understand there's this Internet thing you're moving to, and it's OK as far as it goes, but how will I get a daily newspaper?" The idea that the daily newspaper is dead did not and would not sink in.
My own opinion is that the popularity of the Internet with younger folks is not the only reason for the demise of newspapers; the previously alluded-to journalistic misjudgment plays a role as well. But that's a much longer subject for another day. For now, I think it's a positive step that Mr. Kraner, Mr. Dearing, and Ms. Champion are embracing the possibilities offered by the Internet and the reality of a market that has moved on from traditional newsprint, at least in its current form.
Their task of essentially marrying the old with the new will be a tough one, and I'm not sure yet they appreciate just how tough. But Ann Arbor has a great number of independent, community-minded writers and bloggers (including yours truly, natch) who will be pulling for AnnArbor.com to succeed – and would be happy to help it achieve that success.
Update: Former Ann Arbor News sportswriter Jim Carty keeps a blog, and he published some thoughts from another journalist who attended an AnnArbor.com forum. They are worth checking out.
The Future of Traditional Journalism in Ann Arbor
Copyright and Fair Use at the Ann Arbor Film Festival
Just got back from a panel sponsored by the Ann Arbor Film Festival entitled "Remixing the Rules: Copyright and Fair Use." On the panel were two "intellectual property"* lawyers, Larry Jordan and Matt Bower, and two artists, Mark Hosler of Negativland and experimental filmmaker Craig Baldwin.
Copyright law and its ramifications are of keen interest to me, not just because of the well publicized abuses from the likes of the RIAA suing music lovers, but because of the many questions and issues copyright raises regarding everything from art, culture, law, economics, and technology to, well, to the human condition itself.
Unfortunately, the panel wasn't particularly enlightening. The discussion did in fact focus on "fair use," the legal concept that supposedly defines when, where, and how copyrighted material may be used without permission of the copyright holder. Trouble is, fair use is such a startlingly vague and imprecise doctrine that, in practice, it often ends up being whatever some self-interested, deep-pocketed media conglomerate says it is. (Don't like that? Spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a lawyer to insist otherwise and hope a court eventually agrees with your view.)
I have an admittedly radical view of copyright: I've come to the conclusion it's a bad idea and ideally shouldn't even exist. (See this great book review cum essay by Jeff Tucker that somewhat mirrors my own intellectual development on this subject.)
So naturally during the Q&A I questioned the whole notion of whether ideas and words could actually be considered "property." I wanted to see the artists, at least one of whom had gone through copyright litigation over his work (Hosler), address the issue at its root. Hosler came pretty close during his talk, but unfortunately one of the lawyers jumped on my question and rambled about what the law says and this and that.
Lawyers, of course, only ever want to tell you what the law is, over and over again, and somehow make it seem legitimate just because it happens to exist or has a history of some kind. And this particular lawyer did just that. Plus he was a regrettably dull if not sloppy thinker, at different points using the non-word "copywritten" and saying that the First Amendment "gives" us the right of free speech. That was just sad.
Perhaps someday we will have a real debate over the ever-increasing absurdities engendered by copyright run amok. Until then, I recommend two great blogs that often address the issues raised by extreme copyright: Against Monopoly and TechDirt. Great reading and great food for thought.
* For an explanation of why I put "intellectual property" in quotation marks, see Richard Stallman's lucid and accessible essay on this loaded and inaccurate term.
