- He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind:
- and the fool shall be servant to the wise of heart.
-Proverbs 11:29
The 1960 film Inherit The Wind fictionalized the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial over evolution and the courtroom confrontation between Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan.
“You sir”, says Darrow (Spencer Tracy), “may have an airplane. But the clouds will stink of gasoline and the birds will lose their wonder”.
Darrow is talking about the price of progress.
Every advance exacts a price.
You sir, may have an Internet. But newspapers will lose their relevance and they will cease to exist.
The Rocky Mountain News, venerable paper that it was, with 150 years of reporting history, is no more. And it is only one of many many papers that are going to disappear in the next few years.
The News, and other papers, are all victims of the Internet, in one way or another. And of their inability to adapt fast enough to changing technologies.
As newspapers go today, so too will television networks and local TV news go tomorrow, if not sooner.
This is the terrible price of progress.
The International Herald Tribune this morning carried an article about the death of the Rocky Mountain News in which they interviewed many people in Denver and across the state. While they all mourned the death of the paper, ironically, almost none of them actually read it. The got their news, they said, from the Internet.
Equally telling, the newspaper marked its final edition not in text, but rather in video
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/3390739[/vimeo]The video is incredibly powerful and poignant.
Had they only embraced this medium so well much earlier, they might still be here.
3 Comments
pencilgod March 03, 2009
Oops. What I meant to post is “Shock of the old†is an alternate look at history about how technologies run in parallel for a long time.
I feel that the decline in newspapers has less to do with the internet and more to do with the continued erosion of standards to the point of making newspapers more about paper and less about news. Where as once there were 6 or 7 stories that I found interesting and some I found entertaining I now find very little in the paper to interest me. Ad weak content to that the economic downturn as well as the loss of easy revenue with the classifieds and no wonder papers are going under. A bit of video on the net won’t change that.
And weakening the content and quality of TV with VJ’s will only hasten TV’s decline.
pencilgod March 03, 2009
http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/HistoryOther/HistoryofTechnology/?view=usa&ci=9780195322835
Terry Heaton March 03, 2009
Great post, Michael. I do think, however, that the lesson here is not that technology brought about the end of newspapers, but rather than the people formerly known as the audience USED technology to better serve themselves. This is what most people in the media industry don’t get. It’s not about technology. It’s about people.
And for TV, it’s people fleeing the relentless carpet bombing of unwanted messages.