Quote of the Day (Edward Hoagland, on Secondhand Lives in the Digital Era)

“I appreciate the utility of power in the winter, but many people seldom see a sunrise or sunset nowadays; they’re looking at a screen. What will this do? The Northern Lights, the Big Dipper — are they eclipsed like the multiplication tables? There was a magnetism to aurora borealis or a cradle moon, to spring peepers’ sleigh-bell sound or spindrift surfing toward shore under cumulus clouds, that galvanized delights in us almost Paleolithic.

“Are we stunted if we lose it, a deflation associated with migrating indoors to cyberspace, Facebook instead of faces?” —Essayist-naturalist Edward Hoagland, “Living Life Secondhand,” The New York Times, November 9, 2014

Quote of the Day (John Yemma, on Old and New Media)

“By freeing people from the print production ball and chain, we make a much more competitive website and we will help the journalists be much more competitive. Everybody seems to recognize that print is on its way out.”—Christian Science Monitor editor John Yemma, explaining why his will became the first national newspaper to stop its daily edition and shift to online coverage, quoted by Jenifer B. McKim, “Delivering the News Without the Paper,” The Boston Globe, Oct. 29, 2008

(Maybe I’m just one of those post-45 technophobe stick-in-the-muds, but I don’t buy Yemma’s justification for this radical step. The Monitor—a century old this year—seems, like so many other print papers, unsure about how to stanch its fiscal bleeding. It sounds to me like the way so many corporate heads used to justify their megaexpensive M&A activity in the Eighties and Nineties by trotting out the mantra of “synergies” between the purchasing and acquired companies.

The fact is, few, if any, newspaper editors and publishers have figured out how to create an advertising model that works in cyberspace. Their current round of cost-cutting feels like so much flailing in the dark.

I, for one, continue to be a fan of newsprint. I just wish newspapers could figure out a better way to serve their readers. Little matters like accuracy and transparency would be a start. Notice that I don’t say “fairness.” I’m not sure perfect objectivity is possible, and in any case I think the American media have become as unapologetically partisan as at any time since the 1790s, when Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson had at each other in papers that, for all intents and purposes, were their mouthpieces.)