Papering over the cracks…

After years of unmitigated rubbish on ‘talk radio’ CHRIS BENNETT finds there is hope in the on-line newspaper.

THERE is a flesh and blood aspect to reading papers online. Take this week's little exchange on the subject of Shakespeare’s plot lines in the Times, or it might have been the Spectator. The twinkle in the words of Matthew Parris and his challenger (and possibly champion) would not have had the same frisson in a newspaper, methinks. It was the speed of her reply to Parris’s comments that gave the tweak to the occasion.

Although there remains, in the minds of some newspaper proprietors, serious doubt that the internet is little more than a flash in the chip pan, reality, harsh as only reality can be in this age of virtual everything, is quietly pointing the way; leading the field, as it were.

Newspapers, the more pompous of which refer to their printed versions as “fibre editions”, as though they were some new fangled dietary supplement, are now assessing not so much the question of whether this would be a good time to panic, but more a question of how far up the panic scale should they aim.

The problem lies with the inability of so many to understand that the publication of one’s thoughts is no longer the secret domain of the newspapers. You can do it in the comfort of your own home. Just don’t be surprised a) if there is flak and b) how much time it takes to keep churning out a blog.

Floppy eared bunny hugging types will argue, with conviction if not much sincerity, that the newspaper and the printed book are here to stay. Well, yes. Maybe.

I would be the first to agree that the feel of a book, especially and old one, is something I should prefer not to do without. Similarly, newsprint, that smooth, husk-embedded delight to the touch on which most papers are printed, has something very special about it.

But all this is rather missing the point.

Now that we have all fallen into line with the almighty American way of doing things, our newsreaders, be they SABC, eNews, Sky or any of the others, have become unintelligible. They have been taught that a silence of more than one millisecond will cause the viewer (or even listener, as this blight is equally rotting the wireless) to lose interest.

Meaning, that kernel of garnered thought, in speech (what used to be called the spoken word in the time of professional broadcasting), is powerfully controlled by the use of the pause, and newsreading is the spoken word. Unlike the written word you cannot go back and read it again until you understand.

Consequently most television news has been reduced to slovenly, unintelligible drivel; drivel delivered at such a gabble that even were it intelligible it would remain drivel. To really find out what’s happening you need a newspaper.

This brings me to that gleaming edge of electronic news: its immediacy. The fact that the gifted writer and the eminent scholar had roseate words to exchange was nothing new. The fact that the exchange took place in what we now, rather clumsily, call real time was the diamond in the tiara.

News has become interactive; it is those with the skills needed to both marshal and succinctly to articulate their thoughts that will be the victors of the future. Reading, and writing, has never had such a weight of import, nor such a profundity of reward.

I wonder if any of our schools on the South Coast have noticed these things.