I AM still a bit
gobsmacked this morning by the sale of The Washington
Post, which has just been announced, to Jeff Bezos, of Amazon.
It has already had one quite astonishing result: it produced a
first comment on The Guardian's story which was
actually worth reading. Normally, the first comment on any story
there is compounded of inanity and nastiness, even if things
improve later. But this time there was a joke that summed the whole
thing up: "People who bought The Washington Post also
bought . . ."
There will be even more
unexpected effects. Although the sale may seem a distant matter
from the Church of England, or even the British media, it
highlights, as little else could, the huge changes in the media
industry, and thus the atmosphere through which the Church is
approached.
It is quite reasonable,
in the light of the Washington Post deal, to ask how much
longer it will make sense to have a "press column". My instinct
would be to say "another ten years", but, on second thoughts, this
is too optimistic - and too pessimistic, too. There will be
something like journalism for as long as there is a mass market for
entertainment, and a series of niche markets for information. There
will be printed newspapers that matter for much less time than
that.
The death of the printed
newspaper is a real shame. It could not have been avoided, and I do
not want to romanticise the content unnecessarily. But towards the
end of their reign, the design and layout of printed newspapers had
attained the kind of unity of form and function which cannot be
improved.
When I stand in the
Guardian offices sometimes, and look at the beautiful
pages of the next day's edition, printed and placed up on the wall
for the editors to scrutinise and improve, there is a pleasure and
a surge of respect for all that effort, so well co-ordinated and
with such an aesthetically pleasing result. Other examples would be
a Leica film camera, or, on a larger scale, a tea clipper. And,
unlike those things, a newspaper is doomed to transience by its
nature. You cannot reuse it more than once or twice, or the cats
complain.
The excellence in all
these cases is, to some extent, independent of the content. I
believe that the last tea clippers ended their commercial lives
running opium. Leni Riefenstahl used a Leica. Even newspapers have
been used to disseminate lies and evil. But they were wonderful,
for a moment.
You can still sail a tea
clipper. You can still take pictures with a Leica (while there is
film to be had). But what can you do with a newspaper-printing
plant?
The most notable irony of
the Washington Post purchase is that it should be Mr
Bezos, the founder of Amazon, who bought it. The purchase price -
$250 million - is pocket money to him now: about one per cent of
what his stake in Amazon is worth. It is worth so much, of course,
because Amazon has been one of the prime factors gutting the old
newspaper business-model.
People mostly blame
Google, and that is fair, too. But it would be hard to tell which
firm has done more to destroy the classified ad business that kept
newspapers afloat for a century or more. When you want to buy
something now, it hardly matters whether you go to Amazon or Google
first.
But what about the news?
Oh, catch up at the back. No one will pay for that any more, and
few people ever really did. "News is what a chap who doesn't care
much about anything wants to read," one of the characters in
Scoop says, and this is astonishingly true in the
ad-supported end of the business.
There is another sort of
news, which is whatever is relevant to the things we do, in fact,
care about. Most of this is market-related. But here, too, the
movement away from paper newspapers has been overwhelming, simply
because, with real news, speed matters. So that has gone online,
too.
I am enough of a real
journalist to dislike pomposity and self-importance, even in my own
business; and there is a certain pleasure in seeing The
Washington Post, a paper with (ahem) few rivals in
self-importance, sold off like that to a ruthless billionaire who,
unlike Rupert Murdoch, does not even like the business.
But it does show the last
function of a paper newspaper. That is as the mouthpiece of a man
who wants to show he is rich enough to own one. Sure, you could
probably win the America's Cup for a bit less than The
Washington Post cost, but which of them gives you the greater
bragging rights? Which of them ensures that politicians will listen
to your suggestions respectfully? And some American politicians
really are worth what you pay for them.