The world's first musical obit for print newspapers

http://www.projo.com/opinion/contributors/content/CT_bloom27_03-27-10_7MHPJL4_v19.4056cd4.html



World's first 'musical obit' for snailpapers

-- OPED commentary in the Providence Journal, Editorial Page


March 27, 2010

By DAN BLOOM


I’ve been working in and around newspapers for most of my life, beginning as a newspaper-delivery boy in western Massachusetts, in the 1950s.

During my teenage years, the massive edition of the Sunday New York Times would arrive at the doorstep with a welcome thud, and I’d spend the rest of the morning devouring every section of the paper, lying on the carpet of the living room.

This was a good 40 years, of course, before the Internet shook up my world, and maybe your world, too. You see, the print newspaper that you might be holding in your hands now is headed for the garbage heap of history by 2025, maybe sooner. Well, at least that’s what the doomsayers say as the Digital Age stands up proud with its Kindles and state-of-the-art iPhone e-reading apps and says good riddance to paper.

But wait a minute, I want to say, hold your horses! Print newspapers are not dead yet, and they don’t have to die. As the American writer and newspaper publisher Dave Eggers has said, there’s no reason that print newspapers and online news sites cannot co-exist.

I love print newspapers so much because, yes, of course, I grew up with them. Early life in Springfield, college years in Boston.

For the young generation today growing up with Facebook and Twitter and YouTube, it’s a totally different story, and I understand that story, too. I also have a Facebook page and a Twitter account, so I am not against pixels or E Ink or screengrabs. I just love “snailpapers,” that’s all, and I use that word as a term of endearment, as you will see.

Recently, I wrote a novelty song about newspapers called “I Just Can’t Live (Without My Daily Snailpaper)”. You can find it on YouTube. The reviews have been mixed. First the good news.

Diana McClellan, a retired Washington, D.C., gossip columnist who rose to fame at the now-defunct Washington Star — defunct, in fact, since 1981 (it had a 128-year run, beginning in 1852) — listened to the video and told me: “This is the world’s first musical obit for newspapers!”

Carl Bernstein’s in the song, in the second verse (along with Bob Woodward and Ben Bradlee, their boss at The Washington Post during Watergate days), and after he listened to it, he told me in a brief e-mail about a week later: “Your newspaper love song is delightful, the message is right and your voice is on target.”

Full disclosure: The dude singing the song is not me. I hired a retired dentist in Texas named J. Gale Kilgore to record the song in his home studio and a video firm to make the scrolling lyrics video.

Jeffrey Jolson-Colburn, publisher and editor of the online news site Hollywood Today (and the grandson of Al Jolson, by the way), said the lyrics resonated with him. “I’ve been publisher or editor of 12 newspapers, about half of them print newspapers and half of them online news sites. I wish all were print papers. I’ve got ink in my veins. However, online is only way to stay alive now.”

But not everyone agrees with the song’s intent. Every song has its critics.

I asked a young woman in Australia, screen name Bella Kyee, who I met by chance on Facebook, if she reads any newspapers Down Under and if had any advice on how to help the song go viral on the Internet. She replied in a succinct one-line note, which I reproduce here in its entirety, verbatim: “Noooo! . . . I don’t do newspapers . . . HAHAHA!”

Will print newspapers survive the current onslaught of the Digital Age? I don’t know the answer, but I sure hope they do.

I am not anti-Internet and I am not a Luddite, all humor in my song aside. I embrace digital as much as I embrace paper and print. E Ink is amazing. The blogosphere lights up my life 24/7. I can’t imagine a world without computers or screens or iPods or iPads, and while the coming roll-out of Apple’s iPad might put several more nails in the coffin of print newspapers, I still want to stand up for newspapers and say: “Long may they live!”

So what is the purpose of my song? Hopefully, it will prod newsroom people and news consumers and Brown and Tufts professors to reflect on just where the future of good journalism lies. Like Dave Eggers, I feel it lies in both paper and on screens.

As for the term “snailpapers” that I coined for the song, Paul Gillin, of the Newspaper Death Watch blog, said it well: “[Bloom] thinks maybe if newspapers poked more fun at themselves instead of getting all righteously indignant about new media, they would generate more sympathy.”

It’s true. Print newspapers arrive on our doorsteps in the morning with news that is already perhaps six hours old. That’s a snailpaper, by definition.

But as the song says, “I just can’t live without my daily snailpaper!”

Can you?

On the Web: www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnZKIk1Krp8


Dan Bloom is the creator of this blog.