I’m having ENORMOUS fun putting together my media syllabus for next semester. Not only is the subject matter excellent, but assembling the material is also good. I’m hyperlinking to all sorts of interesting sources for the second half of the class on new media. December’s Atlantic provided me with two more sources.

Michael Hirschorn reports on a video produced for the Museum of Media History, EPIC 2015. It’s worth a watch. The futuristic video reports on the evolution of media and the defeat of print media. It’s internet triumphantalism at its best and campiest.

In the year 2014, people have access to a breadth and depth of information unimaginable in an earlier age. Everyone contributes in some way. Everyone participates to create a living, breathing mediascape. However, the press, as you know it, has ceased to exist. The Fourth Estate’s fortunes have waned. Twentieth-century news organizations are an afterthought, a lonely remnant of a not-too-distant past.

Hirschorn argrees that blogs and other online news sources are ravaging print media:

And while it’s true that fewer and fewer people are purchasing newspapers, it’s also almost certainly true that more and more people are reading news. This thanks to portals, newspaper Web sites, search engines, syndication feeds, and millions of blogs—a goodly percentage built on the hard labor of professional journalists, whose work the bloggers link to, praise, mock, and recombine with the hard labor of other professional journalists. Meanwhile, many of these blogs, produced on the cheap, have become profitable businesses that generate virtually no revenue for the journos who provide the constantly updated fodder. Feasting on the rotting corpse, if you will, while making polite chitchat.

Unlike the utopian (or distopian) EPIC writers, he doesn’t think that print is quite dead yet.

So what does this mean for newsprint? Counterintuitively, I’d argue that this disaggregation strategy could provide a renewed logic to the printed product. As news itself becomes more of an instantly available commodity, readers will crave an oasis of coherence and analysis (which is also why books, and magazines like TheAtlantic and The New Yorker, are potentially brilliant counterprogramming for ADD’ed info burnouts). Online news, microchunked, consumed on the fly, is fast food; the newspaper, fed by its newly invigorated journalist-brands, is the sit-down meal. In this marginally more optimistic future history, the roles of print and digital are inverted. Original news—in the form of stories, postings, and community—begins online, while print offers an intelligent digest/redaction that readers—and not only the elite and elderly—can peruse at their leisure. You could even call it Reader’s Digest.

I think Hirschorn’s right — print isn’t going away. I still like print just because I consume so much info online that I like to get my ass off the computer chair now and then. It’s nice to read in another room. With the larger format, I also can skim print faster than online text. However, I am not sure that print offers more analysis than online news.

I’m not sure what the future holds, except perhaps a good essay question on the final.