Slow News
Yesterday I grabbed the very last of the $5 early copies of the hulking San Francisco Panorama, McSweeney’s epic one-time broadsheet newspaper, from their Valencia Street headquarters. The paper was a five month labor of love of a team of great writers, artists, graphic designers, and investigative journalists to demonstrate what might be done to restore the appeal of a newspaper in the 21st century. I am digging it.
It’ll take me many days to penetrate into this heavy, intimidating pile of tree carcass, but some first impressions are worth sharing.
People don’t actually read newspapers, they step into them like a warm bath
- Marshall McLuhan
This warm bath is more like a jacuzzi tub, luxuriously large and hot. There is a potential for drowning. This thing makes the Sunday NYTimes feel lean by comparison.
Every section delivers something close to that rush I felt as a kid opening the color comics section on Sunday. Panorama’s comics section here is of course a beauty, with contributions from Dan Clowes, Adrian Tomine, Art Spiegelman, Chris Ware and others.
The features look amazing and the A section is inspired, featuring profiles of locals getting ready to ship to Afghanistan, a map of the city showing last weekends crime, the cheapest places to buy gas in the city and a list of current christmas tree lots.
The fat Panoroma Magazine puts the increasingly flimsy Times Magazine to shame. At 112 pages it is several meals on its own, with some gorgeous photography to boot. I like the design column by Chip Kidd where he takes apart the awful Amtrak ticket design. The Panorama Book Review runs another 96 pages with a nice mix of reviews, interviews and short fiction.
These trees died for a good cause. This is pampered, grass-fed, prepared-by-great-chefs Slow News, possessed of nutritional qualities that factory farmed news lacks. A newspaper that doesn’t just regard it’s content as commodity data. A newspaper that doesn’t insult the intelligence of its readers and that indulges the full brilliance of its writers. A newspaper whose editors actually share your interests rather than merely pander to them. A newspaper whose genuine desire to serve the public interest extends beyond the scope of positioning their brand.
The continuing death by a thousand papercuts of the American newspaper is no longer news. Fingers point at the internet, Craig(’slist) Newmark, Google, ravenous corporate consolidation, and the declining literacy and attention span of the American public. It may be too late for the big papers to reverse course and invest in the kind of nutritionally rich, smart slow news advocated by this prototype, and it is easy to argue that there is no longer a viable business model to support it, but it makes for a potent “what if”.
This beast should start appearing wherever McSweeney’s other fine print products are sold for the totally-worth-it price of $16, or you can preorder
December 9th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
pleasantly surprised at your currency on the great media debate — and your conclusions on the mcsweeney’s opus.
there are many of us looking for quality, long-form places to land right now. annnnd, there simply aren’t any. much.
how about a thoughtful quarterly journal on the geopolitical/cultural/anthropological aspects of coffee, written smartly and globally? no syrup sponsors, just subscription revenue and thick paper.
December 9th, 2009 at 1:35 pm
I’m still leafing through it — a friend picked me up a copy yesterday and I picked it up last night — but overall I’m quite impressed. It’s a good model they’ve got going on, and with a fair bit of planning, this actually incorporates a lot of easily applied methods for national and local papers. Eggers was on Forum yesterday (one of the few times I’ll ever tolerate Msr. Krasny), but the points he made about how the paper works — longform investigative journalism, more heavy duty research pieces — really are what can pay dividends in the long run.
(unless those whore-mothers who were on forum yesterday, the “censoring my poor baby from the front page news” win out. You stopped buying papers because there wasn’t kid friendly content on the front page? rly?)
December 12th, 2009 at 11:48 am
Interesting stuff. I recently finished a bachelors degree with at paper on the crisis in newspapers. If you are into some further reading on this subject, I recommend “The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving journalism in the information age” by Philip Meyer.
M