You heard it here first—the theme of next year’s Chicago Humanities Festival will be laughter. When Lawrence Weschler mentioned his intentions my first thought was, Is there really that much to say? Enough to drive something like 140 different programs? But there’s humor in everything, and when a panel of eminent scholars discusses gallows humor, I’ll be there. Even the gloomy talk on the future of the news business that Weschler and I had just heard could have been played for laughs.
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But the model involved clearing thousands of acres of timber in Canada, turning it to pulp and paper, and bringing it south by rail to be covered with ink and trucked to vendors and distributors. As Darnton explained, doing all that no longer makes economic sense—not when the ink and timber can be spared and the news delivered instantaneously by electrons. So think of this as a fleeting time of “journalistic riches,” he told his audience, and enjoy it while you can. The blessings of both old-fashioned newspapers and online news are ours for the moment, but that won’t last.
Darnton’s ability to think along these lines and play it for laughs is demonstrated in the newest of his five novels, Black & White and Dead All Over. At a paper in New York that sounds very much like the Times, the talented, obsessed, somewhat nutty people who staff it snicker at the desperate steps their pandering bosses take to keep a sinking ship afloat. Then the vexing question of mortality becomes literal: members of the staff begin to die—murdered in the most ingenious ways by one of their own. Darnton begins his book with a quote from Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop: “He had once seen… a barely intelligible film about newspaper life in New York where neurotic men in shirt sleeves and eye-shades had rushed from telephone to tape machine, insulting and betraying one another in surroundings of unredeemed squalor.” But Darnton is too affectionate and mournful about the newspaper game to write such an acid satire. Black & White is valedictory humor.
“How will all this affect news itself?” he asked, and moved on to material that if no less depressing was, at least, a little more arguable. In place of the traditional labor-intensive news story, which he fears is obsolete, he said the Internet has given us a “new narrative structure.” It’s the blog—personal, sequential, additive, “almost always subjective,” and when readers are allowed to comment, communal. What we gain from Internet journalism, in his view, is citizen participation. What we lose are traditional standards of reliability and accountability and the serendipitous benefits of reading, just because they’re there, newspaper stories on subjects we’d never have guessed would interest us.
When newspaper companies auger in—to borrow Tom Wolfe’s phrase for a fighter jet spiraling to the ground and blowing up—by lowering their standards to save money, losing even more money as a result, and eventually collapsing, it will be up to others to originate as well as package news. Darnton worries that a “generation of illiterate news consumers” will be created, consumers who don’t know how poorly they’re being informed because they’ve forgotten (or never knew) what good journalism was. They’ll be beguiled by second-rate journalism’s ability to pass as something better. Reporters will go on quoting sources, and how will readers know if these were good sources, which can be damn hard to cultivate, or just a few marginal figures impressed with the sound of their own voices?
