Stop the presses!!!
Last night I felt bad for The New York Times.
We watched The Daily Show, and in one taped segement, ‘correspondent’ Jason Jones went to visit The New York Times, and proceeded to make snarky comments at and with the staff of The Times, including Managing Editor Bill Keller.
Well, it was a cheap shot. And easy shot but a cheap shot.
As everyone knows, newspapers are pretty much finished. Which is tragic in itself.
And, as Keller pointed out, “when I went to Baghdad, I didn’t see any bureaus from The Huffington Post or Drudge or Google”.
All of which is true.
I am not sure, however, that Google or Huffington or Drudge are the final act in the Web conversion of the news business either.
They, after all, do nothing but parasite off of places like The New York Times.
This is not really a new incarnation of journalism, but rather a rather feeble attemtp to pick at the carcass.
Places like Google News and Drudge are not creators of a new journalism, they are simply scavangers and parasites.
That does not mean that these new technologies will not give birth to a new kind of journalism, but my guess is that it is going to be far more radically different than simply links to NY Times stories.
In 1489, Sandro Botticelli painted The Annunciation, (shown above).
This was a news story.
It was a news story for 1489, in what was then the most powerful broadcasting medium of its time – oil on canvass.
Painting like The Annunciation were commissioned not so much for their decorative value (though that was a powerful point), but rather for the information that they ‘broadcast’ to the masses.
In a world devoid of imagery of any kind, paintings like The Annunciation were the MTV of Medieval and Renaissance Europe. Illiterate peasants visiting a church or cathedral in which a painting like this had been hung would have been simply overwhelmed at the power of the image. Most likely they had rarely if ever seen anything like this. It was like IMAX… even better. They would drop to their knees and go “wow” for quite a while.
The paintings were there to inform and educate.
Just like TV news or newspapers.
And the big news was (in this case), Flash: Dateline Bethlehem. The Archangel Gabriel today told the Virgin Mary that soon she would be bearing God’s child. More to come…
Well, this WAS big news.
And, a bit like 9/11, even in our own jaded day, a breaking news story that still had legs, even long after the fact. (Just ask Rudy Guiliani).
The technology of the times militated toward oil on canvas as the very best way of crafting and disseminating ‘news’ stories.
And if you look at the painting, you will see that the story and reporting are very detailed.
Note that even though the real story takes place in Bethlehem, the scene outside the window looks a good deal more like Medieval Italy than 1st Century Palestine. The same goes for the Roman architecture (or Mary’s very European looks). All of this was to make the ‘viewer’ far more comfortable with the ‘story’. (A bit like having Brian Williams report from Baghdad. Or stories of amazingly western looking (and sounding) interview subjects this morning from Teheran. We don’t want anything too foreign or weird here).
Botticelli’s painting is, indeed, The New York Times of its era.
The very pinnacle of the oil on canvas school of news and information dissemination.
The irony here is that The Annunciation was painted in 1489, a mere 30 years after Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press – the Internet of its day.
The printing press would herald an entirely new way to dissemination news and information, rendering Botticelli and his ilk to the realm of museums.
I have no doubt that one day there will indeed be museusm where there will be front pages of The New York Times and schoolchildren will, with great boredom pass from headline page to headline page wondering when they can have lunch.
What followed Botticelli however, was not a better way to make paintings or to exhibit them (what Drudge and Google News do now). Rather the technology of the press gave rise to an entirely new way of thinking, working and interacting with news and the public.
So too, I think, will the web.
But I don’t think Google News or Huffington Post come anywhere near where we are headed.
