Whistling Past The Gutenberg Graveyard

Before I became Paw Paw Bill, I always included my middle initial in my writing byline, William C. Cotter. I grew up reading the legendary foreign affairs correspondent Joseph C. Harsch in The Christian Science Monitor, even before I discovered Ralph McGill and Furman Bisher in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The Monitor arrived in my childhood home delivered daily by U.S. Mail. The subscriber, my mother, was a Christian Science Practitioner. I left the church the same year I quit my high school football team after four seasons. This was the year I read Huck Finn and learned my favorite jester was serious as shackles. My football coach telephoned again and again, but I could not talk to him, did not know how to explain. The only time I ever went back inside a Christian Science Church was the October 1962 Sunday of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Don’t bother to tell me the old one about how there are no atheists in foxholes.

The Christian Science Monitor will cease publication as a daily newspaper next month. It will concentrate on providing news via the internet and will begin a weekly newsmagazine under its 100-year-old name. The Monitor says it may be “the first newspaper with a national audience to shift from a daily print format to an online publication that is updated continuously each day.” But not likely the last. Look for the long line. Journalistic respect for The Monitor has been reflected in seven Pulitzer Prizes, elections of three of its editors as president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. However, most of today’s newspapers are sinking from their own weight in dinosaur technology, ink, newsprint, and gasoline fueled distribution, while advertising adapts, evolves, and migrates to other media. The Monitor will lose $18.9 million this year. "A modest reduction" in the editorial staff is to be expected, but all hands will contribute to the new formats. The Monitor weekly print edition will be priced at $3.50 per copy, a year's subscription $89. The last full-price subscription to the daily newspaper has been $219. The new daily electronic edition will be offered by subscription also, price yet to be announced.

When New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., was asked recently whether The Times would still be printing in 10 years, he answered, “We can't care." He said that he expects print to be around for a long time but "we must be where people want us for our information." The Times is already largely available on the internet. Here’s the real unanswered question: Will internet users pay money to read the news and other information? You can be sure that is the discussion going on at newspapers all over the country. Not will the news go on-line or when, but how to make any money. I suggest the model already used by the music business, which licenses its products to users, radio stations, bars and restaurants, barber and beauty shops, even the internet, then keeps aggressive accounts. For decades, ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) and BMI (Broadcast Music, Inc.) have successfully insured that all songwriters, composers and publishers have the right to be paid for the use of their work. In the same manner, news publishers could license their products to Google, Yahoo, AOL and others, collecting some modest sum, pennies per browse, that would add up to support for the news business.

Copyright 2009 by William C. Cotter

Gutenberg Graveyard

I won’t deny that I have one foot in the Guttenberg graveyard and the other on a computer generated image of a banana peel. Hand-written parchment and papyrus preceded the printing press. Earlier yet, Frenchmen drew on the walls of the caves of Lascaux, and Egyptians carved and painted hieroglyphics in the tombs of the pharaohs. Who knows what silicon and laser humans will employ to satisfy their irresistible urge to communicate their experiences and imaginations?

Electronic gadgets frustrate me. I get impatient, push the wrong button, and everything stops working, sometimes setting off an alarm, like a signal for the cops or the fire department. Usually the only thing clear about the instructions is that English is not their mother tongue. Nonetheless I have read with interest and curiosity the recent NEWSWEEK article about the release of a new electronic book device by internet bookseller Amazon. Called the Kindle, the gadget is far from the first, only the latest e-reader. The price for the Kindle is $399 each. Still, when I checked Amazon.Com three weeks before Christmas, they were all sold out and would not promise delivery until after the big gift giving day. I didn’t really want one, anyway. There are other manufacturers of e-readers, and stores such as Best Buys advertise them as available. I don’t really want one of them, either. I’ll wait till the price drops to the low double-digits like the portable CD player I bought at Wal-Mart.

My interest in these devices really focuses on the future of the written word. No doubt books, newspapers, magazines are losing people’s attention today. Does that mean people don’t or won’t read? My Antioch College writing professor Nolan Miller told me several years ago that there were getting to be “too many writers and not enough readers.” Probably true. Nolan taught writers for 50 years and was fiction editor of The Antioch Review at least as long. Maybe he died before he could see how this situation only creates a certain democracy in the flow of ideas and communications, even as it shakes up the economics of publishing and writing.

The blog you are reading does not require that I affiliate myself with some commercial conglomerate, other than the internet itself. Nobody tells me what to write about, how to write it, or when. That’s the good news. The bad news is nobody pays me for it, either. I guess the time will come when I can make my own novel or collection of poems available to the e-reader market. Maybe in time also, some methods of payment will evolve. I hope so. Otherwise, the only people who can devote the thought and time to it will be the wealthy, the retired, and those with sinecures in the royal court. There is also the issue of copyrights, which protect creative and intellectual property. I am sorry to say that technology has failed so far to prevent blatant theft of copyrighted works by consumers with easy access and no conscience or awareness that they are stealing the food from another person’s table.

The music industry, through performing rights representatives ASCAP and BMI, offers a tried and true model. They collect licensing fees from record labels, radio and television broadcasters, bars and restaurants, and most recently the internet, and establish ways of measuring the use of copyrighted music. This is one of the main ways musicians and composers earn money for their work, just like the paycheck you get from your job. Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, the estate of George Gershwin, and many songwriters without famous names get paid this way. Next time you download something you did not pay for, think about it.

Copyright 2007 by William C. Cotter