[MGP-Forum Announce] Sony starts selling the Soney eBook reader: $349.00

[tom stites]

> . . . why put 1,000 words into
> text that work better as still photos with audio? Why try to explain
> how the Space Shuttle docks with the International Space Station when
> an animated graphic works better?

And I'm not objecting to multimedia.  My point of my post was to assert that
lots of people would read journalism if it were meaningful to them, that
reading is not only for educated people who are not young.

But reading does have deep value to democracy, which is what I care about
most -- without it there will be no meaningful journalism for anybody, text,
video, or multimedia.

Here's a snip from my Media Giraffe Summit speech that addresses this:

> In the 1980s the late Neil Postman wrote an enduringly important book called
> Amusing Ourselves to Death.  In it he says that Marshall McLuhan only came
> close to getting it right in his famous adage, that the medium is the message.
> Postman corrects McLuhan by saying that the medium is the metaphor ­ a
> metaphor for the way we think.  Written narrative that people can read,
> Postman goes on, is a metaphor for thinking logically. And he says that image
> media bypass reason and go straight to the emotions. The image media are a
> metaphor for not thinking logically. Images disable thinking, so unless people
> read and use their reason democracy is disabled as well.
> 
> So I don¹t care whether people read written narrative from newsprint or from a
> screen, and while participation in the news process is important it¹s OK with
> me if people are passive receivers of written narrative that¹s selected by
> editors. What matters is that they read news, that their reason is engaged,
> that they are equipped as well as they can be to be effective citizens.
> 
I heartily commend Postman¹s book to all who haven¹t read it.  It is indeed
enduringly important.

> We're entering a world of storytelling Zen: the story decides how it
> wants to be told. Sometimes video. Sometimes still photos. Sometimes
> audio. Sometimes graphics. Sometimes text. More than likely, some
> combo of all. And, for journalism, the story is linked to people who
> carry on the conversation and add to the story. Not elite at all.

Stories about policy issues and the economy and political struggles are best
told in print, with graphic support, so that they can best engage the
readers¹ capacity for reason.  Abandoning politics, policy, and economics to
the sound-bite vapidity of broadcast TV and the opinion spinners of cable
news gets us the gutted democracy we have now.

I¹m cheering for the emerging digital and participative media, hoping that
their use spreads beyond the tiny elite who now takes part.  If that
happens, it could be a real boost for democracy.

Tom
 
>>> Subject: Re: [MGP-Forum Announce] Sony starts selling the Soney
>>> eBook reader:
>>> $349.00
>>> 
>>> they'll have to market to the over-50 crowd, the only group that
>>> really wants to read newspapers. everyone under 30 wants to see,
>>> hear, share, talk about, contribute to.......
>> 
>> I fear that the myth that young adults don't care to read could
>> become true
>> if the people who produce journalism act is if it is true.  There
>> is no
>> shortage of evidence that this is a myth; the Harris Poll, for
>> example,
>> finds a significantly higher incidence of GenXers reading national
>> newspapers than in the general population.
>> 
>> Lots of well-educated people also say that poor people don't like
>> to read,
>> but there's no shortage of evidence to the contrary on this point,
>> as well.
>> For example, Wal-Mart is the fourth largest retailer of books, after
>> Borders, Barnes and Noble, and Amazon.  And sales of mass-market
>> paperbacks
>> have been growing for years.
>> 
>> For decades well-educated people have also asserted that people
>> won't read
>> long stories in newspapers, especially working class people.  But
>> that's not
>> true either. Donald Barlett's and James B. Steele's Philadelphia
>> Inquirer
>> series, "America: What Went Wrong?", consumed at least two full
>> broadsheet
>> pages a day for a week and squarely addressed the issues of working
>> people
>> -- the people who supposedly won't read long stories (or, more
>> recently,
>> supposedly won't read at all).  When the Barlett-Steele series
>> appeared the
>> Inquirer's circulation shot up by 15,000 a day.  When the paper made
>> reprints of the series available, the lines outside the Inquirer
>> building
>> were so long the paper had to hire security guards to string velvet
>> ropes to
>> keep the lines orderly.  The Inquirer couldn't produce the reprints
>> fast
>> enough, and gave away more than 200,000 of them.  That was before
>> the series
>> was repackaged as a book that went to No. 1 on the New York Times
>> best-seller list and sold more than 650,000 copies.  The average
>> best-seller
>> sells a little over 100,000 copies, indicating that A:WWW? Spilled
>> over from
>> the usual middle-class book-buying crowd into people who don't buy
>> many
>> books -- the folks that the myth says won't read.
>> 
>> It's my deep belief that people of all ages and socioeconomic
>> strata will
>> read eagerly if presented with articles that squarely address the
>> issues
>> that affect them directly, articles that are meaningful and
>> relevant to
>> their lives.  And there's plenty of evidence to support this belief.
>> 
>> The real problem is that very few news organizations publish
>> articles for
>> readers other than the affluent, middle-aged readers their advertisers
>> crave.  This discarding of all but the affluent readers is a
>> journalistic
>> disgrace and crisis of democracy.  The challenge facing us is to
>> find ways
>> to bring quality journalism to everybody -- if we succeed, perhaps our
>> enfeebled democracy will regain some of its strength.
>> 
>> I addressed this topic more fully in my luncheon speech at the
>> Media Giraffe
>> Summit in Amherst in July; the text is posted on the Center for
>> Citizen
>> Journalism blog at
>> http://citmedia.org/blog/2006/07/03/guest-posting-is-media-
>> performance-democ
>> racys-critical-issue/ .
>> 
>> Tom Stites
>> Publisher, UU World magazine
>> Unitarian Universalist Association
>> 25 Beacon Street
>> Boston, MA 02108
>> tstites at uua.org
>> 617-948-6504
>> 617-742-7025 (fax)
>> 
>> www.uuworld.org
>> www.uua.org
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
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> 

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