viewpoint The Future of News Is on Screens, and Community Media Can Be a Part of It The last battle of the War of 1812, the seizure of Fort Bowyer, in what is now Alabama, by the British, happened more than a month after the Treaty of Ghent ended the War of 1812. (The larger and more well-remembered Battle of New Orleans also ended before U.S. President James Madison ratified the same already-signed treaty.) In the 17th century, the battle of Prague continued nearly a week after the Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years’ War in Europe. Multiple Japanese soldiers serving in World War II, perhaps most famously 2nd Lt. Hiroo Onoda in the Philippines, refused to surrender their combat posts in the South Pacific until as late as the 1970s. We can say what we like about the relative merits of printed newspapers and magazines versus their digital counterparts, but the proverbial writing is on the wall. Each day, a greater proportion of the billions of words read by people across the world are read from a screen rather than a page—and that trajectory will never reverse. Perhaps you are someone who enjoys the convenience of reading the New York Times on your iPad. Perhaps you are someone who insists on nothing less than the sensory experience of paper in your hands and the smell of ink as you catch up on current events. Perhaps your preferences and tolerances vis-à-vis the format of your media depend on the context, with some topics and settings well suited for screen reading and others seeming to call out for the timeless appeal of the printed word. But for media consumers, producers and advertisers to eschew the rise of digital distribution is to fight a battle long over. There are arguments for and against all media formats. Famed media scholar Neil Postman spent much of his celebrated (albeit contentious) academic career lamenting the rise of television, in part because he believed the printed word was fundamentally better suited for comprehensive mental processing and understanding of phenomena and partly because he was concerned about the commercial structure of television advertising. He
8
may-jul 2022 | boulevard
[ by james d. ivory, ph.d. ]
Healthy local media remain vital to the vibrancy of communities’ culture and business, but continue to be ever more threatened by the economics of the media landscape.
