103rd and the survival of newspapers

I would like to congratulate The FREEMAN on its 103rd anniversary this Monday, July 18. The FREEMAN continues to serve the community reliably and credibly despite the challenges of the pandemic, and even prior to that, the disruption of the digital age and social media.

Thomas Jefferson (1757) once said: “The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

Over two centuries later, it looks like Jefferson’s unease --the possibility of a government without newspapers-- is becoming a reality. All over the world, thousands of local and national newspapers have either folded up, drastically cut down on their operations, or merged with bigger newspapers. There’s a question that hangs in the air over the viability of newspapers in the digital age. The most optimistic projection gives newspapers until 2044 or just around 20 years from now.

Dare I say one can never be certain. Like any consumer product in the world, as long as newspapers continue to be a result or a projection of human need, they stay in the market. The newspaper industry had its heydays in the last century. We may not see that golden age again, but it does not mean that newspapers (yes, in their paper and ink form) will disappear in our lifetime.

Just like their traditional media cousin, the AM and FM radio, newspapers are here to stay as long as they don’t lose focus on the essentials --like keeping the citizenry well-informed and interested to know the truth. The biggest challenge is how to build an agile and resilient economic model that would pay for the cost of maintaining journalistic integrity and professionalism.

There are newspapers that have closed their print edition and transitioned to full digital publication. Yet referring to themselves as “digital newspapers” kind of misses the point of Marshall McLuhan's famous phrase, "The medium is the message". McLuhan explained that the medium embeds itself in any message it would transmit or convey, “creating a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived."

McLuhan even went as far to suggest that the medium could be as important, if not more important, than the content. “By stressing that the medium is the message rather than the content, I'm not suggesting that content plays no role—merely that it plays a distinctly subordinate role,” McLuhan said. In his seminal work entitled “Understanding Media” (1964), McLuhan said that it is the medium that “shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.”

In this sense, those who dismiss newspapers as a relic of the past usually fail to see media beyond its being a mere object or vehicle for content. They only see the vastness and quick speed of the digital form, and the latter’s ability to impress and enthrall its audience.

But media or forms of communication are more than a tool. They are the “physical, sensorial, perceptual and symbolic environments or structures in which people make sense of their world.” Media, regardless of content, reshape human experience and exert far more change in our world than the sum total of the messages they contain, McLuhan said.

The paper and ink medium engages almost all the senses. Even if many readers today use digital media, there are those who appreciate the creativity that the physical and sensory experience stirs. Print also tells the reader that the message is important and relevant enough to deserve a tactile form --the resources of ink, paper, and the printing press.

Newspapers did not go out of business with the invention of radio and television. With the digital age and the invention of social media, are newspapers still going to survive this time?

I dare say that nothing good has really come out of social media in recent years. It connected us with many family and friends, old and new, but it also disconnected us with people and things that matter. That’s the nature of the social media platform --it is a waste of time, it is full of fake content, and it thrives on the virality of hate and on our dopamine-driven emotions.

The newspaper medium and what it represents will survive this digital disruption.