We want information… information… information.

Mar 05

information, media, news, technology 1 Comment

So here’s the scene: I’m sitting in a cafe in Kuala Lumpur’s airport last summer, waiting for my flight to Bangkok, and I’m reading William Powers’ essay Hamlet’s Blackberry: Why Paper is Eternal which dives into the numerous reasons why paper continues to have a firm grip on how we experience information. Of course, I’m flipping through this 75-page PDF on my laptop. Go figure.

Fast forward to a couple of days ago, I’m scanning the CBC mobile site on my iPod Touch when this headline pops out: “Print industry to worsen before any improvements: experts.” The train of thought that Powers had started in his piece continues here: while the tangible nature of paper is what allows us to focus solely on the information presented to us, it is fast becoming a less viable medium for newspapers, whose struggles are only more exacerbated with the overall economic downturn we’re experiencing. The death knells are tolling louder.

A comment that stuck out for me came from Toronto Star publisher John Cruickshank who asks “The issue, it seems to me, is not so much ‘Do people want newspapers?’ as ‘Do they want news?’ and ‘What’s the definition of the news they want?’” A similar sentiment was echoed in David Carr’s column in the New York Times in January, as he calls for an iTunes for news. Which is what Amazon’s Kindle 2 is supposed to achieve…eventually.

But I want to dig deeper into the 2 questions that Cruickshank raises, which I think are central to the existential dilemma that the media (used in its broadest sense) faces every morning as it stares with haggard eyes into the bathroom mirror. The first is easy to answer in my opinion: yes, people want news. We’ve been collectively fed a steady diet of what’s the latest breaking thing to hit the airwaves and streets. We’ve accustomed ourselves to accept this idea that with tomorrow’s dawn, something new will be waiting for us – shoes, video games, news.

Essentially what we’re craving for is information – in whatever shape, size or colour it arrives in. And that’s why the second question is a tougher nut to crack, and deserves a blog post all of its own. But I’ll leave you with a beautiful line to ponder from Daniel Okrent’s Digital Journalist editorial from February 200, titled The Death of Print?:

“A newspaper gives you timeliness, a magazine perspective, a book lasting value. ”

So what does the digital medium give us?