So it’s all falling down around us. Across our country the presses are falling silent, jobs are flaking away in the thousands, surviving broadsheets are chopped to easy-to swallow tabloids; and one day the newsagent joins the ranks of irrelevantly-named institutions – along with the record shop and the video store.
It’s been a brutal couple of months, between the shock announcement of two printing plants and 1,900 jobs to be axed at Fairfax, editors of The Age and Sydney Morning Herald stepping down along with News Corp’s decision to split off its ailing publishing sector from its growing entertainment division. With the sudden closure of Brisbane street press Rave and the disappearance of Tasmania’s Sauce magazine, music lovers can’t help but be affected.
Even Scene magazine publisher Howard Duggan is far from surprised by the demise of Rave, assuring readers that they can expect more street presses to fold.
“It has been clear for quite a few years that the writing has been on the walls for print and it is simply a matter of time when all the titles are gone and the order that they disappear is of no consequence,” said Duggan.
The news was so grim that the managing director of Street Press Australia Craig Treweek felt he needed to issue a lengthy statement entitled ‘Rumours Of Our Death Are Grossly Exaggerated,’ a six point dissertation that essentially shouted ‘we’re not going anywhere.’
The article asserted that both print and digital are still relevant, albeit if they adapted to the changing climate in a survival of the fittest. “Are times tough?” writes Treweek, “yes they are… but like any industry that suffers a decline, those that face the challenges head on and embrace them will survive.”
The very fact that Street Press Australia felt compelled to clarify their future in such a way should demonstrate enough the state of print media; and let’s not forget, while all the street press publications are now racing online after largely ignoring for years the opportunity they had to become the dominate voice online, how many digital publications are racing to open a street press?
‘It’s a bit sad’, we say. ‘I just like the feel of a paper’, we say. Then we read about it online. Because in reality, how many of you read all this news about the demise of print media actually – in a newspaper or in street press itself?
So is this really the end of print media? And what does that mean for music? What does a printless future really mean for artists, music journalists, and the fans?
Let’s start with the musos. Assuming you’d like to make it big someday, (or maybe just not be working at Athlete’s Foot trying to ignore the creeps that really enjoy having their feet touched) – let me ask you a question. If Rolling Stone and every other music mag were cleared from newsagents tomorrow, if you never tripped over a stack of Beat on a drunken walk home again – would you panic?
If you want exposure for your music, whether it’s an album review, an interview or a gig listing, digital trumps print in almost every way. Print can’t give you the same power to pinpoint your audience, to be so accessible worldwide, to interact immediately with your fans, and most importantly – to share your music.
The biggest blow really is a sentimental one. We all have different ideas of success, but is there satisfaction like seeing a shining mention of your band in real paper and ink? Or, in the words of Dr. Hook, there’s nothing like “the thrill that will getcha when you get your picture on the cover on the Rolling Stone.”
So what do the bare street stoops and empty magazine racks mean for music journalists? Do we really have to go and get real jobs?
Music websites and blogs have created endless possibilities for aspiring writers to get ‘an in’ as a contributor or an intern and start building a folio of work. The problem is that sufficiently paid writing opportunities beyond that are pretty limited.
With the amount of free content, how could it not be? Like music itself, the supply has radically outstripped demand, and the overflowing available content on blogs and websites has severely reduced the value of music writers.
In addition, the decline of paid writers combined with the sudden leap from localised print to competing globally online hasn’t meant great things for music journalism. The pressure to be first on the newsfeed has spurred the rise of ‘churnalism’ – a trend of scrambling to publish unoriginal content in an attempt to keep up with other news websites.
Often this means sacrificing proper research and fact-checking in order to publish quickly. This is the reality faced by all news media – time pressures and financial constraints means less original, thoughtful, and investigative content and a dependency on competitors and PR press releases for news.
And before you all jump down our throats, of course Tone Deaf is not immune from these pressures. But as the 24 hour news cycle slowly becomes the norm for music journalism, which has been long protected by the weekly if not monthly print cycle of street press and magazines, is it any wonder that the wider audience is beginning to see print media as sluggish and increasingly irrelevant?
After all, half the pages are filled with news that’s a week old, but that shouldn’t be a reflection on the writers, it’s merely a reflection on the inability of the format to keep up pace with the changing expectations of readers who want everything, available immediately.
It mustn’t be just the readers who are seeing the format as increasingly on the margin – the real decline going on is of course a decline in advertising spending, brought on no doubt by the music industry’s slowly increasing apathy towards a format struggling to remain relevant.
It’s interesting that news and music journalism are both plagued by the same problems – job cuts, shifting media platforms, recycled content. The fear of the changes in news journalism is a threat to democratic values. But in music criticism, we’ve found the opposite effect – the move to online has cut out the journalistic middleman, returned the voice to the people, and allowed popularity to be dictated by an aggregation of the masses.
The accessibility of blogs means that now anyone who can listen to music can write about it and potentially be counted. Music does need the authority of incisive and experienced journalists, but arguably, the most important input comes from the fans – the ones who listen to music, who talk music, who sit at their laptops for hours and write about it without a thought of getting paid for it.
The very same passionate fans who fuel the content of street press pages nationwide, and the same writers who – if they haven’t already – will make the migration to online media.
So what about you, the reader? If street presses disappear, would you really struggle to entertain yourself while waiting for your latte? How often do you read a magazine cover-to-cover anyway? Preferring to pick the articles you’re actually interested in, just as you would a website. And most importantly, online is free. Things should be free, right? Look at Facebook, Twitter, Google, news, music, TV.
It’s an impossible scenario we’ve demanded, and it’s found a way to sustain itself – on us.
There was a meme that made the rounds a few years back, showing a picture of two pigs in a barn. One says to the other, ‘Isn’t this great? We don’t have to pay for the barn. Even the food is free!’ The caption down the bottom says it all – ‘If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer. You’re the product being sold.’
So maybe this is the future. We get our free lunch, as long as those companies can pick a little off us here and there. Our demands are now personalised and instantaneous, something the sluggish, mass-produced print media will – by its inherent nature – always struggle with.
So can print media really survive? And do we really care beyond sentimental attachment?
Honestly, we don’t believe that we will see the complete demise of print media for at least a while. What we’re witnessing is a radical shift, a once dominant medium squeezing to the demands of a niche one in a very short time-frame.
There is room for existence, but not variety. For example, Brisbane couldn’t sustain four music street presses, it certainly was no longer financially viable for Rave. Perhaps for a while we’ll see cities carrying one, maybe two street presses, but they too will have to answer difficult questions about their relevance in years to come.
Fairfax has been forced to move to a one-newsroom model to be able to share content amongst its different mastheads. They are harsh decisions to make, but it means survival.
We also know that just because a medium has been overtaken by technology doesn’t mean that it will disappear completely. CDs and books still have their place, and you only need to look at the dogmatic resurgence of vinyl to know that physical isn’t extinct.
Whether it’s newspapers or iPads – they will all fade away in time. Even stone engravers had to pack up their chisels once. So what? Journalism and music are integral to human civilisation, democracy, culture, identity and life. Writing and art are intertwined, and will continue to thrive and support each other in one format or another.
But maybe we’d like to drunkenly trip over stacks of street presses for a little while longer. Besides, you can’t toilet train your dog with an iPad.
Although there’s probably an app for that.
