What newspapers did next (2)

As newspaper publishers struggle with the problem of making new media journalism pay, and daily news habits migrate online, it’s easy to think that the newspaper itself is about to disappear.

Just as radio disappeared when TV was invented. Or the horse completely died out after the invention of the car. Or why vinyl is something you only now see in museums.

Except, of course, the invention of TV forced radio not to disappear, but to reinvent itself. It found a different niche in people’s lives, and honed the skill of telling stories through the medium of sound, as pictures could be seen elsewhere.

Now that horses aren’t the only way of travelling that isn’t on foot, riding a horse is a more remarkable experience. The nature of the animal, the power, the rush of not being encased in a protective shell or fully in control of your movements are what make horseriding something unique, and even more thrilling than it would have seemed two hundred years ago.

Vinyl didn’t go away either – it became a more focused, niche medium for those who appreciate its unique qualities. Competition doesn’t automatically create obsolescence. It creates opportunity, and forces enhancement and focus. When you don’t have to do everything, you can concentrate only on what you do really well. It is only when a medium’s inherent qualities are superceded in pretty much every way by its successors, that it is in danger (wax cylinders, VHS).

That’s why I believe that print magazines will continue and thrive, alongside e-magazines and the like. And also why newsprint isn’t dead yet.

The newspaper format itself is a unique piece of haptic technology, with its own distinct aura among societies all over the world. As a format and an object, it has power, associations, relevance. It is uniquely both disposable and authoritative.

Content printed on newsprint suggests that it what you are about to look at is immediate, informed, and designed to be useful, perhaps reportage or analysis that will help inform your day.

The same content in a book form suggests longevity, permanence, importance, as something to spend a while with and then to remain on your bookshelf as a part of the footnotes of your life. Discarding it will be a more difficult decision than to recycle a newspaper.

In other words, form tells our brain how to approach content. The best publications are those that know how to manipulate the properties of both.

Enter The Newspaper Club. Fans of the form as well as its content, last year they published a simple, really lovely creation, called Things Our Friends Have Written on the Internet.

Concept proven, they moved forward and gained funding from the marvellous British public-service innovation fund 4iP among others, to create a forthcoming service I’m really rather excited about.

It is, quite simply, print on demand for newspapers. And even more brilliantly, their system (currently in testing phase) is designed to allow anyone to make a newspaper, no matter how limited their design skills are. The cherry on the cake – or the cake under the cherry, depending on your perspective – is that you can order any number of papers, from 5 to 5,000.

If the service can fulfill its potential, then it promises nothing less than to liberate the medium, to democratise newsprint, and to give the tools to the people to create a sudden flurry of hyper-local newspapers, creative fanzines, affordable catalogues, unusual teaching tools/reading lists, remarkable experiments in democracy and community, stunning one-offs in unexpected places, new ways of sharing event photography and a general rethink about what the medium can be used for. And that’s just what has emerged from their testing phase.

All of this creativity can only benefit newspapers themselves. Unless, that is, they’re piss-poor local newspapers with no competition to keep them keen, and with a few disgruntled ex-staffers that they recently made redundant. In which case, I’d start to get worried.

The best bit is this: by getting in now, before most news publishers migrate elsewhere and the presses are closed, The Newspaper Club are giving newsprint a chance to reinvent itself early, before we start to lose the skills and machinery that would be needed to make it truly succeed.

Perhaps a collection of such smaller tasks, combined with a few big clients, could provide enough income keep newsprint going – and even provide much-needed revenue for the mainstream newspapers themselves. There has always been extra capacity available at newsprint plants; never has it been more needed to be filled. And what a way to fill it.

If similar foresight had occurred with camera film, perhaps The Impossible Project might have had a different name.

If you want to see a lovely sample of what can be done, you could do far worse than to pick up the latest, limited-edition, graphic design mag Gym Class, printed by the Newspaper Club. It features lots of lovely content, including a unique magazine collection geek-off between me and Boico.