Romanticising about print newspapers misguided when digital age is upon us

THE SUMMERS were hotter when we were kids. That’s one of my favourites.

It conjures up nostalgia for a bright past that was never cloudy. It’s also a lie. Summers come and go.

It seems a peculiar human habit to re-invent the past in ways that make living in the shadow of the past easier. We also seem to just like believing that our earlier experiences were the best of human life and anyone of a different generation missed out.

You hear this, for example, in how retired Joburg hippies say: “Melville just isn’t what it used to be!” And, of course, the truly old ones say the same of Yeoville.

I bet you the young revellers who are living up intense memories on 7th Street in Melville nowadays will also claim the summer was hottest this year when they retire to Greenside in 2030 or wherever people will move to next as they outgrow the suburbs of their younger selves.

So the nostalgia of every generation will be uttered again and again while the young ones roll their eyes.

All of this struck me as I read the nostalgia of older journalists about hardcopy editions of newspapers.

My friend Anton Harber, cofounder and former editor of the Weekly Mail (today Mail & Guardian), wrote with heartfelt nostalgia recently about how much poorer journalism and our democracy would be if Mail & Guardian were to fold. This remark is in the wake of reports of the newspaper facing a financial crisis.

But I want to disagree with him. Music was not killed by successive changes in music technology.

Music is such an integral part of our social lives that only the panicstricken would fear that changes in the delivery of artistic creations would kill the art itself.

News, for me, and news analysis, should be seen similarly.

It is impossible to undo the history of information.

It is forever a part of human life as we know it that news will happen, that news will break, that news will be investigated, and that news will lead to analysis, introspection, accountability, and all sorts of real, material effects on our lives.

Newspapers, as in physical bits of paper you buy daily or weekly, are not important. It’s the content that matters. The medium really isn’t the message any more.

And so one has to wonder what it is that media commentators and hacks bemoan, wistfully?

I think it is simply a yearning to keep the artefacts of their earlier careers intact. That is quite self- indulgent, come to think of it. It is like writers, myself included, secretly hoping people buy hard copies of my books – if they buy them at all – rather than e-books. I project my own romance about hardcopy on to my readers.

Frankly, I should get with the times and not impose a hierarchy of ways of delivering stories to the reader.

Some readers will hear my stories on radio or on a podcast, others will read them on a Kindle and yet others in hard-copy. And that’s a perfectly acceptable variety.

And if in 20 years’ time all book sales are e-book sales, so what? My memory of hard-copy, and my own collection of hard-copy books, can remain my personal pride without me thinking that our democracy is poorer without physical books.

I would worry more if Harber, as an experienced and insightful newspaper expert, told me content would suffer in the absence of a physical copy of the Mail & Guardian being available to the consumer. But that would be an exaggeration.

News sites like The Daily Vox and GroundUp, and news analysis portals like Daily Maverick, are arguably as valuable to democracy as physical newspapers.

Dare I say it, I often read betterquality reporting and analysis on some of these sites than many of our traditional newspapers that pretend to be the gold standard of pro- gressive, pro-poor journalism or comment and analysis.

What newspapers should do is simple. Follow your consumers.

These days it is inaccurate to think of us as merely spending a bit of time online during the day.

Rather, we have digital identities that are an integral part of who we are in the 21st century. And so come into our space and invent business models fit for these changes.

Newspapers say they know this but the romance about hard-copy editions tells a different story. So what if Mail & Guardian isn’t available in hard-copy?

Get on with strategising how to be part of the digital economy. It is here to stay.