The Mark 2010

The technology that best distributes information defines the mass public. Increasingly, this isn’t newsprint.

There has been plenty of speculation about how the iPad will change newspapers. But this question misses the mark. The more important concern is what the iPad and devices like it mean for society as a whole. Newspapers are the technology through which the mass public is formed, and in this sense, the iPad itself may become the new paper.

This is not the first time newspapers have faced competition from other media and turned to technology and multimedia design to secure their primacy as the foremost public forum. Faced with the prospect of magazines capturing the mass market in reading in the 1890s, newspapers across North America introduced new features, new pricing, and new ways of addressing readers. This was the moment when colourful, extravagantly illustrated lifestyle magazines and comic strip supplements, as well as sports, entertainment, and classified sections became central to the very definition of the Saturday paper in Canada and the Sunday paper in the U.S. Weekend reading made the democratic public, the mass public, and the mass market of consumers interchangeable with the newspaper reading public.

But the technology of massive printing presses and ultra-modern newspaper offices were as much a part of the spectacle as lavishly designed newsprint. Special issues were printed lauding new colour presses and new head office towers. The Boston Globe, for one, distributed cut-out toy replicas of its printing press (as a supplement to the Sunday paper, of course) and even installed a viewing gallery to turn the printing floor into a tourist destination. Through technological innovation and investment, newspapers won out over magazines in the competition to become the uber-text that wrote to “everybody.”

When moving pictures became mainstream in the 1910s, newspapers at first collaborated in producing newsreels and promotional tie-ins. When governments licensed radio waves in 1922, newspapers owned their own stations. Papers quickly learned, however, that the act of reading remained central to connecting the audience to the diversity of everyday life. Remember, readers were consuming more than news; they also needed papers for advertising, classifieds, cultural and social events, real estate, and consumer news. National networks for film, radio, and television could not provide such variety to viewers in different cities because they were limited by time. The newspaper, however, could grow larger to accommodate whatever readers wanted, so long as advertising revenue grew along with it. Thus, newspapers kept their monopoly on public address by becoming resolutely local.

The internet, however, presents a very different challenge.

Global communication technology is at odds with this local foundation. People can now easily find information on any subject they like from any number of sources from anywhere in the world. On top of this is the propensity of journalists and publishers to focus on the more prestigious function of news in creating the democratic public sphere, largely ignoring or denigrating leisure and consumption elements (on which ad revenue, and thus profits, were actually based).

Newspapers have therefore lost their monopoly on providing everything one needs to know for the day – and they will never be able to reclaim it. The internet, especially social networking and Web 2.0 technologies, has utterly transformed the way people consume public information for mass entertainment, and personal interest alike.

Traditional print newspapers are now moving very cautiously into the iPad domain. But as long as Apple retains control over the content sent out over their iPads, with the power to arbitrarily remove content as it sees fit, the mission of newspapers – political independence, objectivity – will be severely compromised. Not just editorial independence, but the very definition of newspapers' relationship with their reading public: questions of sharing revenue and subscriber data remain to be settled.

The technology that distributes the “paper” is the one that constitutes the public at large, and this doesn't happen primarily through newsprint anymore. Nor does it happen through the corporations that still print newspapers.

Of course, to ask how the iPad will change newspapers presumes the primacy of the iPad – far from a sure thing, to judge from early responses. While the iPad offers new functionality for video, it doesn't really improve much on text. Designing iPad applications that fully incorporate video may make iPad-based news truly different. It's possible that video and hypertext applications on the iPad, along with cuts in television news, may mean new possibilities for multimedia journalism that fully exploits the new technologies. After all, the “news magazine supplement” (such as this one you're reading) has flourished using new technology, no longer confined to Sunday mornings.