As Sarah O’Connor observes, technology has changed the way many of us consume information, from complex pieces of writing to short video clips…
The year was 1988, a former Hollywood actor was in the White House, and Postman was worried about the ascendancy of pictures over words in American media, culture and politics. Television “conditions our minds to apprehend the world through fragmented pictures and forces other media to orient themselves in that direction,” he argued in an essay in his book Conscientious Objections. “A culture does not have to force scholars to flee to render them impotent. A culture does not have to burn books to assure that they will not be read . . . There are other ways to achieve stupidity.”
What might have seemed curmudgeonly in 1988 reads more like prophecy from the perspective of 2024. This month, the OECD released the results of a vast exercise: in-person assessments of the literacy, numeracy and problem-solving skills of 160,000 adults aged 16-65 in 31 different countries and economies. Compared with the last set of assessments a decade earlier, the trends in literacy skills were striking. Proficiency improved significantly in only two countries (Finland and Denmark), remained stable in 14, and declined significantly in 11, with the biggest deterioration in Korea, Lithuania, New Zealand and Poland.
Among adults with tertiary-level education (such as university graduates), literacy proficiency fell in 13 countries and only increased in Finland, while nearly all countries and economies experienced declines in literacy proficiency among adults with below upper secondary education. Singapore and the US had the biggest inequalities in both literacy and numeracy.
“Thirty per cent of Americans read at a level that you would expect from a 10-year-old child,” Andreas Schleicher, director for education and skills at the OECD, told me — referring to the proportion of people in the US who scored level 1 or below in literacy. “It is actually hard to imagine — that every third person you meet on the street has difficulties reading even simple things.”
In some countries, the deterioration is partly explained by an ageing population and rising levels of immigration, but Schleicher says these factors alone do not fully account for the trend. His own hypothesis would come as no surprise to Postman: that technology has changed the way many of us consume information, away from longer, more complex pieces of writing, such as books and newspaper articles, to short social media posts and video clips.
At the same time, social media has made it more likely that you “read stuff that confirms your views, rather than engages with diverse perspectives, and that’s what you need to get to [the top levels] on the [OECD literacy] assessment, where you need to distinguish fact from opinion, navigate ambiguity, manage complexity,” Schleicher explained.
The implications for politics and the quality of public debate are already evident. These, too, were foreseen. In 2007, writer Caleb Crain wrote an article called “Twilight of the Books” in The New Yorker magazine about what a possible post-literate culture might look like. In oral cultures, he wrote, cliché and stereotype are valued, conflict and name-calling are prized because they are memorable, and speakers tend not to correct themselves because “it is only in a literate culture that the past’s inconsistencies have to be accounted for”. Does that sound familiar?…
One recalls Plato’s report that Socrates lamented the introduction of writing (on the grounds that it would erode the centrality of the memory and memorization and the tradition of oral disputation). And one reckons that in retrospect, even as one acknowledges that Socrates wasn’t wrong, one is not sorry that writing came to play the foundational role that it has in scholarship, culture, and commerce.
So perhaps we’re just in the first steps of a transition on the other side of which a new kind of literacy has displaced the current one (and advanced our state of being in the same way that writing has). Perhaps. Even then, in the moment it’s anxiety-provoking: even if we are bound for a new (higher-order?) literacy, it’s the curse of the earlier phases of a tectonic cultural shift that what we’re losing is much clearer than what we may gain.
As we fumble toward the future, we might recall that it was on this date in 1992 that HAL 9000, the AI character (and main antagonist) in Arthur C. Clarke’s (and Stanley Kubrick’s) Space Odyssey series.
More specifically: In the film, HAL became operational on 12 January 1992, at the HAL Laboratories in Urbana, Illinois, as production number 3. The activation year was 1991 in earlier screenplays and changed to 1997 in Clarke’s novel written and released in conjunction with the movie.
Tina Zimmermann, Amazon Tsunami, installation at the European Cultural Center Venice, April-November 2022, Palazzo Mora, Venice, Italy. [Courtesy of the artist]
As we rid ourselves of the detritus of the Holiday season, let us pause to consider its signature component: at the turn of the 21st century, corrugated cardboard accounted for just fifteen percent of the United States recycling stream; today, it’s nearly half. Shannon Mattern on the cardboard box…
… As historian Maria Rentetzi writes (“Cardboard Box: The Politics of Materiality,” in Boxes: A Field Guide), “the cardboard box — the waste of our commercial world — is recycled in such a way as to make visible the disorder in our societies, the faults of capitalism.” It is an abject object that touches all parts of the city, from the granite kitchen island to the sewer grate. And for many of us, the cardboard box is our closest touchpoint to globalized trade, structuring our relations with people in distant places. It brings the logistics chain to our doorstep. The magnificently ripped metal freight container may get the Economist cover shot, but the plain brown box delivers messages to our homes. Its very existence in our homes, Marshall McLuhan would say, is the message. In the immortal words of Walter Paepcke, founder of the Container Corporation of America, “packages are not just commodities; they are communications.”
Let’s unpack that, shall we? Boxes are media in multiple senses of the word. They’re lithographed surfaces designed to be read, and they’re dimensional containers that mediate between outside and inside worlds. They’re “media of transport and information, shapers of public opinion and consumer desire, and means of targeting attention.” And they’re “logistical media” that “arrange people and property into time and space,” that “coordinate and control the movement of labor, people, and things situated along and within global supply chains.” The cardboard box is a minimalist form with maximalist ambitions, an arboreal apparatus made from one of the world’s most abundant renewable resources, then filled with plastic and moved around by copious quantities of oil. It doesn’t just coordinate and control landscapes; it transforms them.
Cardboard’s ubiquity rests on simple claims: I can hold that, and I can go there. The Container Corporation of America was founded in 1926, and upon those claims it built an empire with surprising reach. The CCA made collapsible shipping boxes, and it transformed packaging into a science and an art. It advanced market research, shaped mid-century taste, and altered the chromatic universe through color standards. It employed some of the best graphic designers of the period, and as national borders shifted after the Second World War, it commissioned Herbert Bayer, author of the Universal typeface, to revise the World Geo-Graphic Atlas. Even then, the CCA was remaking that new world to meet its logistical needs, rehabbing mining towns and germinating forests, and orchestrating civic discourse about all of this.
How did a packaging company get into the publishing business — into the containment and distribution of information? How were geographic imaginations changed in the process? Soon we’ll dive into the Paepcke archive, to find answers to those questions. But first I want to show you how a cardboard box is made…
As we tape it tight, we might recall that it was on this date in 1910 that a federal official who might slowed the onset of the cardboard box was fired: Gifford Pinchot, the first chief of the United States Forest Service, was fired by President William Howard Taft. Pinchot had opposed Taft’s newly appointed Secretary of the Interior, Richard Ballinger, who favored commercial exploitation of federal reserve lands.
During President Theodore Roosevelt’s term, Pinchot had help enable policies for the conservation of natural resources. Roosevelt had designated millions of acres to protect as National Forests. That legacy was threatened, so Pinchot pressured Taft to remove Ballinger from office. In November of 1909, Collier’s Magazine had created a scandal when it accused Ballinger of shady dealings in coal lands in Alaska. When Pinchot criticized both Ballinger and Taft, the president reacted by firing him.
Well, in any case, it’s been a trying time for journalism. What’s next? The estimable Nieman Lab polled 21 experts…
Each year, we ask some of the smartest people in journalism and media what they think is coming in the next 12 months. At the end of a trying 2024, here’s what they had to say…
They’re all eminently worth reviewing, but your correspondent would call out a few:
Many publishers remain anchored to hierarchies born in the print era, with editorial at the center and product and technology bolted on as afterthoughts…
The gap between mainstream media readers, people who get most of their news through influencers or partisan social media, and people who barely think about news at all will create a fundamental schism in how Americans see the world… 2024 was the year “disinformation” outlasted its usefulness. Moving forward, we should not be concerned with isolated incorrect facts, but with the deeply-rooted stories that circulate at all levels of culture and shape our points of view. The challenge for 2025 is to confront these deeper epistemic divides that shape how Americans understand the world…
Somewhere in the future, beyond 2025, a flourishing landscape of adequately financed, equitable media enterprises will deliver impactful content, serve diverse communities, and achieve financial independence…
* Ben Hecht (from Erik Dorn, his first novel, written while he was a journalist covering the aftermath of World War I in Berlin for the Chicago Daily News)
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As we contemplate civil discourse, we might recall that it was on this date in 1768 that the first volume of the first edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica was published by its Edinburgh-based founders, Colin Macfarquhar and Andrew Bell. It relatively quickly attained a reputation for excellence in its summarization of knowledge. It prospered in print until the digital revolution and the advent of, first Encarta (which decimated print encyclopedia sales), then Wikipedia (which has much broader and often deeper coverage than a print encyclopedia can, and which has continued to improve its reliability to a level approaching that of EB).
Title page from a 1771 printing of the first edition (source)
In the most recent issue of his “No Mercy/No Malice” newsletter, “The Podcast Election,” Scott Galloway makes the case that “in each election the victor is likely to be whoever best weaponizes an emerging medium.” John Grinspan (curator of political history at the Smithsonian Institution) offers a timely historical example: Long before anyone was accused of being “woke,” the Wide Awakes used new news technology to rapidly construct a national movement…
… when I discuss the deep history of political division in our country, someone in the audience always asserts that we can’t possibly compare past divisions to the present, because our media landscape is doing unprecedented harm, unlike anything seen in the past.
I’m always struck by people’s belief in a placid media landscape in the past, a time of calm before the internet blew everything up. In fact, the most divided period in the history of U.S. democracy — the mid-1800s — coincided with a sudden boom in new communications technologies, confrontational political influencers, widespread disinformation, and nasty fights over free speech. This media landscape helped bring about the Civil War.
The point is not that 21st century media is like the 19th century’s, but that the past was hardly full of the upstanding, rational, nonpartisan journalists many like to believe it was. And at this era’s center, in the campaign that actually led to the war, was a huge, strange, forgotten movement — the Wide Awakes — born from this media landscape and fought out in the newspapers, polling places and, ultimately, battlefields of the nation.
Newspapers had been around for centuries by the 1800s, but as American rates of literacy rose, millions of ordinary citizens became daily news junkies. The number of papers jumped from a few publications in 1800 to 4,000 brawling rags by 1860, collectively printing hundreds of millions of pages each year. They ranged from the snarky, immensely popular New York Herald and the blood-drenched true crime reports in the National Police Gazette to the high-minded abolitionism of The Liberator.
Nearly everyone literate devoured them — from wealthy elites to schoolgirls to enslaved people technically banned from reading. Newspapers published scandals and rumors, riling mobs and sparking frequent attacks on editors — often by other editors. Well into the 20th century, communities were still pulling newspaper presses out of local rivers, having been hurled there by angry mobs.
These partisan presses, not the government, even printed the election ballots. Readers voted by cutting ballots from their pages and bringing them to the polls. (Imagine if TikTok influencers or podcasters were responsible for administering elections.)
The telegraph may seem old-timey today, but with its introduction in the 1840s, Americans could suddenly disseminate breaking news across huge territories along electrical wires. It allowed people to argue the issues nationwide, long before the internet, television, or even radio.
Americans became a people by arguing politics in the press. When politics was local, the major parties had avoided discussing slavery, taking what Abraham Lincoln mocked as a “don’t care” attitude. But now that Maine could debate with Texas, the topic shot to the forefront. By the 1850s, Northerners were digesting its evils daily.
The National Era — an abolitionist paper in Washington — first printed Harriet Beecher Stowe’s hair-raising Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by far the most influential antislavery novel in history. Meanwhile, the radical pro-slavery magazine De Bow’s Review, based in New Orleans, spread a maximalist vision of expanding slavery far and wide. Americans living thousands of miles from each other could argue about the issue, and the only gatekeepers were editors who profited from spreading often legitimate outrage.
It’s fitting, then, that the Northern pushback to slavery’s expansion came from the 19th-century equivalent of “very online” young newspaper readers. Early in the 1860 election, a core of young clerks in Connecticut formed a club to help campaign for the antislavery Republican Party. They happened to live in the state with the highest literacy rates and huge newspaper circulations. So when a local editor wrote that the Republicans seemed “wide awake” in the campaign, the boys named their club the Wide Awakes.
Adding militaristic uniforms, torch-lit midnight rallies, and an open eye as their all-seeing symbol, a new movement was born, which I chronicle in my recent book, Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force that Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War. Often, their chief issue was not the knotty specifics of what to do about slavery, but the fight for a “Free Press” — unsuppressed by supporters of slavery, South or North.
The Wide Awakes exploded across the national newspaper network. Within months of their founding, young Republicans were forming clubs from Connecticut to California. Most learned how to organize their companies through the papers. They built a reciprocal relationship with America’s press: cheering friendly newspaper offices and harassing pro-slavery Democratic papers’ headquarters. Friendly editors returned the favor, marching with the Wide Awakes and pushing their readers to form more clubs, like the Indiana newspaperman who nudged: “Cannot such an organization be gotten up in this town?”
None of this could be described as independent journalism, but it sure spread a movement. It only took a few months to turn the Wide Awakes into one of the largest partisan movements America had ever seen, believed to have 500,000 members — the equivalent of 5 million today, proportionally speaking.
The same network of newspapers spread fear as well. Readers in much of the South saw the clubs as a partisan paramilitary organization. Wild accounts shared accidental misinformation and deliberate disinformation, pushing the false notion that the Wide Awakes were preparing for a war, not an election. The presence of a few hundred African American Wide Awakes in Boston morphed into claims in Mississippi that “the Wide Awakes are composed mainly of Negroes” who were plotting a race war. A dispersed, partisan media exaggerated such falsehoods like a national game of telephone.
By the time Lincoln won election in November 1860, hysterical editors predicted a Wide Awake attack on the South. Secessionist newspapers used fears of Wide Awakes to help push states out of the Union…
… What began in ink was spiraling into lead and steel. It took 16 years to develop from the introduction of the telegraph to the Civil War. Undoubtedly, the fight over slavery caused that conflict, but the newspapers fed it, amplified it, exaggerated it.
Mid-19th-century Americans lived with an odd combination: an unprecedented ability to spread information, but also a siloed and partisan system of interpreting it. It helped the nation finally reckon with the crimes of slavery, but also spread bad faith, irrational panic, and outright lies. This history can add a needed perspective to today’s political conflicts, so often magnified by social media. In both eras, new technologies supercharged existing political tensions. Yet we can also see from this heated history that political media is less like an unstoppable, unreformable force that will consume democracy, and more like another in a succession of breathtaking, catastrophic, wild new landscapes that must be tamed…
As we muse on media, we might recall that it was on this date in 1969 that journalist Seymour Hersh submitted the story that (the following day) filed the story that broke the news of the My Lai massacre to the American public. At least 347 (up to 504) Vietnamese civilians, almost all women, children, and elderly men, were murdered by U.S. soldiers, the largest massacre of civilians by U.S. forces in the 20th century.
Hersh had tried the day before to place a cautious and conservative piece but was initially rejected by Life and Look magazines. He turned to his friend David Obst, who ran the anti-war Dispatch News Service and who placed a more candid version in 35 papers (including the Washington Post and the Boston Globe); it ran in those papers the following day. Initial reaction was muted, as the press was focused on a massive anti-war demonstration in Washington scheduled for November 15. But the story spread, prompting global outrage and fueling domestic opposition to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Hersh’s coverage of the atrocity earned him the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.
It’s all too clear that the fourth estate in the U.S. is in trouble. Indeed, the wrenching contraction of the field has become one of journalism’s most covered stories. Here, for example, Alex Weprin on the sorry state of things…
It wasn’t all that long ago that a billionaire buying a storied news publication was a sign of hope and optimism. After all, they had money to lose, and they earned their fortunes by creating something new. Maybe they could figure out how to make media work?
And what about private equity? It’s an industry premised on turnarounds: acquiring underperforming companies, reimagining them and making them succeed.
Or the classic family-owned publication: Keeping a business in the family with no goal of excessive profits, just a certain amount of stability to keep the legacy alive.
Unfortunately, it seems, no category of owner appears able to salvage a media business in decline, with business models still stuck in the past (programmatic, anyone?) and editorial models built for a world before Facebook, TikTok and artificial intelligence.
The media sector is facing a crisis unlike anything seen since the 2008 financial mess, with layoffs and cost-cutting at every turn. The cuts have all occurred in the backdrop of declining web readership at many major publishers over the past year, as tech giants like Meta (Instagram, Facebook) and Google try to keep consumers on their own platforms while old standby referrers like Twitter/X no longer deliver as many readers and the social media landscape fractures.
The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Time, Condé Nast, Sports Illustrated, Business Insider, New York Daily News, National Geographic and The Baltimore Sun have all been in the news just this month for layoffs, cost-cutting, labor walkouts or bleak prognosticating…
There are other– so many other– examples of this kind of grim survey I might have cited, e.g. here or here…
But as Monika Bauerlein, CEO of Mother Jones + Reveal, explains, news– like democracy– can be saved. After recounting several of the same examples, she stipulates to the issue, and then offers a way forward:
… What is—to use a word smart men love to toss out—the gamechanger for the news business?
There isn’t one. Period. End of story.
That’s not a doom prediction. It’s just a reality check. Because the news “business” is over. Dead. No smart guy or better mousetrap is going to get us to a world where quality journalism makes enough money to survive as a for-profit business.
And the truth is, it never did. There was a period when publishers and broadcasters raked in the dough because they were the only ones who could get ads in front of eyeballs. But even then, what made the money was not the shoeleather accountability work. It was the sports section, the real estate supplement, the bar ads.
That model did start creaking in the late 20th century. And then, sometime later, it stopped creaking. Because it was dead.
Sure, there are zombies walking around: hedge fund–owned newspapers, digital startups trying to party like it’s 2009, magazines run by Anna Wintour. But they are getting shakier with each year, sometimes each week. TheMessenger, which launched last year with a promise to assemble a giant audience with viral stories and softball Donald Trump interviews, was still publishing when I started writing this column. By the time I found a closing sentence eight hours later it was gone, having set on fire $50 million in startup capital—enough to run Mother Jones well into 2026.
Some news companies have managed to avoid zombification, most notably the New York Times. But that’s because the Times found a business model as a lifestyle brand for the literate, cosmopolitan, and somewhat liberal. How many news-based lifestyle brands can there be?
No doubt there will be a handful of other commercial news organizations that thrive as for-profit companies. But a handful is nowhere near enough. We need thousands of robust newsrooms to serve the many different audiences that make up our democracy. And to get there, we need to stop pretending journalism can make anyone rich, and instead try like hell to serve the public interest… while breaking even.
That’s it. No fancy mousetrap, no shiny object for investors or funders. No billionaire owners who might push out the editor-in-chief because they’re upset with coverage of their friend’s dog. No faux centrist news from conservative heavyweights. Just a hard slog of putting together the money, one dollar at a time, to give people the information they need to change the world, one heart and mind at a time.
That’s what Mother Jones has been trying to do for the past (nearly) half-century. It’s the toughest model to make work. Except for all the others.
Here’s a proposition to all those funders, donors, and investors looking for the Next Big Thing. It’s not quite “one weird trick,” as the internet used to say, but there is a pretty simple formula for survival in the news business. The Next Big Thing, it turns out, might be the Big Thing That Was There All Along:
Create solid journalism that earns the trust of a community—geographic, identity-based, or interest-based (for example, Mother Jones’ community is one of people who want to see the world change for the better).
Give folks a chance to support that journalism with their money, attention, and input
To that foundation of trust and support, add an honest, smart business operation that brings in whatever other forms of revenue are available so long as they don’t undermine #1.
That’s it! No white papers, no pitch decks, no BS…
* Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
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As we contribute to clear-sighted civil discourse, we might recall that it was on this date in 1981 that Walter Cronkite, who had anchored the CBS Evening News for 19 years, signed off for the final time. A journalist since 1935, Cronkite had joined CBS in 1950 (though he’d been offered, but refused a chance to join the “Murrow Boys” team of war correspondents in 1943). He did reportage, anchored political convention coverage, hosted You Are There and CBS’s Morning Show (its answer to NBC’s Today), and was the lead broadcaster of the network’s coverage of the 1960 Winter Olympics, the first-ever time such an event was televised in the United States (replacing Jim McKay, who had suffered a mental breakdown).
Then, on April 16, 1962, Cronkite succeeded Douglas Edwards as anchorman of the CBS’s nightly feature newscast; in September of 1963, that 15 minute show was expanded to a half hour. Cronkite also hosted the network’s special coverage– perhaps most notably, of the Kennedy assassination and of NASA missions. He became “the most trusted man in America” and received numerous honors including two Peabody Awards, a George Polk Award, an Emmy Award, and in 1981 was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Jimmy Carter.
Except on nights when he closed with opinion (as, famously, his observations on the Vietnam War), he ended every newscast with the words “… and that’s the way it is,” followed by the date of the broadcast.
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