Pictures of a Floating World
The Philadelphia Inquirer Seeks a Community Calling in Cyberspace
By Arielle Emmett © Arielle Emmett
Abstract
The Philadelphia Inquirer is attempting to find a suitable Web structure to advance a strategy of breaking news “firsts,” “hyper-locality” and virtual community news hubbing in cyberspace. This paper explores the theoretical and practical contradictions the Inquirer faces as it strives to reinvent its news and visual imprint for a growing Internet readership.
Based on field observations and extensive interviews conducted in 2008-2009 with 30 key Philadelphia Inquirer and Philly.com editorial, design, and business staff, I argue that the very same geo-social newspaper traditions that extend to the Inquirer notion of “reader,” “audience,” and what news is and should bemay be thwarting the development of immersive, interactive news “journeys” and visual story telling for the Web, along with advanced data retrieval and model semantics. These techniques would help make digital news come alive for Inquirer readers, especially if the news organization addresses two underserved cyber-communities, among them women, and local digital “have nots,” those who do not have laptop to traditional broadband but who are, increasingly, connecting to the Web through personal mobile devices.
The crux of this paper is that the aura of digital “cities” has supplanted the newspaper’s aura as a work of populist, city-centric art and discourse (Benjamin, 1935). The Internet has now produced a series of virtual communities that represent floating cities, and with them, a crisis in the grounded world of metropolitan newspapers like The Inquirer. This paper explores digital news as a floating city, much like Japanese Ukiyo-e art-work that is socially engaging, bourgeois, highly interactive, and hyper-communicative with minimal use of text.
Introduction
For more than two centuries the American newspaper was presumed to be the rock-solid voice of communities and common sense. The early newspapers positioned themselves as forums for political critique, geo-centric anchors and binding influences that helped knit emerging towns and communities together. Although some of the “Penny Papers” might have resembled a common man’s rag bag of moral pronouncements, fashion fads, strange tales, and colorfully embellished scenes of disaster, crime, and corruption, newspapers in the main, quickly acquired community authority and a strong set of geographic ties. The notion of “local,” particularly for metro papers, set an agenda that gave editors and reporters a rich mix of stories, values, people, and places to explore. The rise of papers – as social forums, as creators of a daily “virtual world” reflected in printed stories, illustration, and photography – drew strength from the real world of American towns and cities, their boundaries and limits. To borrow from media critic Walter Benjamin, each city had a unique aura of power relationships, biases, deprivations, and points of pride. Newspapers acquired an aura of primacy by belonging uniquely to the city and its communities. No one in the media system seemed to anticipate that the aura of the newspaper and its geocentric roots might be disrupted by the same technologies that helped automate its production (Benjamin, 1935).
By the 1990s, though, disruptions had begun in earnest. Both narrowband and broadband Internet became reality and “real cities” (as centers of public discourse) seemingly evaporated within the second life of cyberspace. Networking protocols made every computer user’s address a “real address” in the virtual world – an address as easy to reach as a neighborhood mailbox. Virtual, electronic publications sprang up, along with cyber-communities and blogs coalescing around the special interests and psychological needs of members. For example, websites now cater to those with hobbies such as gaming, shopping, or simulations. Some cement organizational and religious ties, or fulfill users’ wishes to reach out and connect with strangers, whether those strangers are “real” or “faux,” virtually represented through avatars. In turn, printed newspapers quickly lost authorial primacy and readership in their respective cities, most obviously among young, educated readers, who readily consumed news, chat, messaging, research, entertainment, and social text (e.g., FaceBook, Twitter) freely in the “quick hit,” hyperlinked manner of the Internet’s World Wide Web. No longer was it possible for the traditional metro paper to claim it “owned” the city aura. The Internet had produced a world of floating cities – and with them, a crisis in the grounded world of newspapers, of print traditions, and of narrative and visual forms devised exclusively for the 19th and 20th century two-dimensional, sequentially produced worlds of the tabloid and broadsheet.
Today, the American newspaper has arguably lost its aura as a work of populist, city-centric art and discourse. The metro paper especially has sacrificed its position as the most compelling tool of popular expression and public voices.
Twentieth century media critic Walter Benjamin described the “aura” as a sense of uniqueness that comes from the original artwork and “is inseparable from its being imbedded in the fabric of tradition. This tradition is thoroughly alive and extremely changeable” (Benjamin, 1935, p. 389). Although Benjamin may never have conceived of a newspaper as an original art form (he decried any mass-produced form as having “depreciated” the aura of originality), he did understand the importance of cultural context – “tradition” – in giving an art form its special meanings. He stated: “Originally the contextual integration of art in tradition found its expression in the cult. We know that the earliest art works originated in the service of ritual – first the magical, then the religious kind. It is significant that the existence of the work of art with reference to its aura is never entirely separated from its ritual function” (p. 389). In the case of the American newspaper, daily reading among thousands, then millions of citizens gave the newspaper its aura of ritualized authority.
By the time Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders were charging up San Juan Hill, “yellow” newspapers had acquired a social aura replicating hegemonic codes (Hall, 1980), sanctioning American nationalist interests abroad while contributing to “social hemorrhaging” of marginalized groups at home – the poor, the female, the immigrant, the child laborer, and the ethnic. At the same time, news media of the early 20th century produced muckrakers and alternative voices that exposed the “social skin” of the American underclass. The dialectic between voices of privilege and cries of outrage would become one compelling reason that the aura of 19th and 20th century newspapers burned bright.
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IRB approved (February 2008) at University of Maryland College Park. Renewed Feb. 2009.
