Sheer Insanity and Search
June 7, 2011
Jan Wenner’s bon mot—“sheer insanity and insecurity and fear”—caught my attention. Addled geese are not crazy. Loons, as I recall, have that distinction. Insecurity resonates. Here in Harrod’s Creek a shotgun or an automatic weapon can reduce a goose in a nonce. Fear. Yep, fear. Got it.
The question is, “Do these characterizations apply to the iPad and other tablets?” The write up “Jann Wenner: Magazines’ Rush to iPad Is ‘Sheer Insanity and Insecurity and Fear” accomplishes a fusion which caused me to do some thinking. First, here’s the passage that flapped my wings:
Magazines that depend on photography, and design, and long reads, and quality stuff, are going to do just fine despite the internet and cable news. Because in those areas there’s a real advantage to getting a print product and having something you can hold and that of course is portable and has a luxurious feeling and is comfortable and immersive and you can spend time with it and it’s organized for you. In the age of the 24-hour news cycle and the availability of the internet you have to focus on those qualities in your magazine even more. Really you have to deliver quality more than ever. And unless you can deliver something that’s quality and really compelling there’s just too many …media choices around now. Unless you’re really good you’re in trouble.
Three observations:
First, the notion of quality is an important one. Online delivers information which lacks a tactile component. Mr. Wenner makes an important point about a product one can hold. Digital content may be great but it looks like baloney. Stripped from a Web site, content just floats. With an iPad one holds an Apple or some other manufacturer’s gizmo. The publisher and his / her content is like a sardine in a tin. Who remembers an individual sardine?
Second, another dimension of quality for Mr. Wenner is organization. Who organizes content on the Internet? I suppose I do, but I am not interested in news. I am focused on capturing ideas and links which I used to store in my paper notebooks. I use the content of this blog as raw material for my books. The New Landscape of Search is an example. I use the information captured in this blog in that book, which costs money and has a greater content payload than any collection of my blog posts from airports and restaurants. Mr. Wenner is spot on.
Third, the notion of “always on” and a 24 hour news cycle has changed how many people conceptualize information. I think Mr.Wenner is correct but I think that for certain demographics, there will be little appetite for a hard copy anything. I think the gameification of content is gathering momentum. I miss magazines like Life which I used to flip through on long summer afternoons at my grandparents’ house in nowheresville. The problem is that “quality” has a different freight of meaning for lots of folks y0unger than the goose. There is, I assert, no turning back.
Bottom line? Traditional publishing is under considerable pressure. I don’t think the executives are much different than an executive at Kentucky Fried Chicken who missed his quarterly numbers. The iPad is still fresh and for some, it is perfectly logical to assume that creating online content is pretty much the same as traditional magazine content creation. Publishing executives have to do something. Paper, ink, distribution, and design are not getting much cheaper in my experience.
But my interest is in finding information, search, if you will. Can I find content in a pay walled, iPadded, and filtered world? Not easily. So we are moving backwards as publishers try to press forward. I find this an interesting situation which seems a bit like the Dark Ages running on zippy new gizmos powered by XML.
Stephen E Arnold, June 7, 2011
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, the resource for enterprise search information and current news about data fusion
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