I went to a mixer last night that was, according to the invitation, to be on the topic of “publishing,” and brought along a friend, a publicist for a boutique publishing house in the Chicago suburbs, who was looking to do some networking and meet some of her peers.
As it turned out however, two of the three advertised speakers (the third didn’t show up) were members of what I like to call the Screen-Based Community, which is to say professional bloggers, and the discussion was entirely about online publishing, micro-blogs, corporate blogs, and the like.
Attempting to be a devil’s advocate and a mild-to-moderate pain in the ass, I tried during the discussion session that followed the presentations to question the largely unquestioned assumption by at least one of the presenters that, as he put it, “print is dying a slow and painful death.”
It is inarguable that many print publications are exhibiting these days all of the signs of “cachexia” (wasting away), and it is equally inarguable that, if present trends continue, we may sooner or later be left with only a handful of print newspapers — the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and so on — and few if any of the traditional city newspapers. Here in Chicago, in fact, there appears to be a spirited race between the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune to see whose pulp incarnation will disappear first.
Magazines, most of them anyway, would appear to be in trouble too, as their lifeline, advertising, slowly bleeds away to the Web.
But, as I pointed out during the discussion, “present trends almost never continue.” The reason is that technology trends, and trends in general, rarely if ever move in a straight and predictable line, and are instead subject to reconsiderations, reversals, and revivals of older and seemingly abandoned methodologies. [Read more →]
Tags: books & writing, trusted media & news by Michael Antman
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