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Hallo again to all. As much as we dearly love computers and all the manner of magic they can
do, we love print and paper with an equal, if not greater, passion. Perhaps
it grows white hotter as that first love fades away, which surely all agree
it is doing*. Newspapers are the most pressing example of an information technology
whose end may have come. News there will always be, and people to report it
— even if that's only a matter of gossiping at the water cooler, tweeting, or
tossing a status update on Facebook. But investigative reporting and the hard
slogging through data to get to the point? All this has been preoccupying us as we've thought about the massive volume of
reporting that will be given over to the US Episcopal
Church's General Convention, to be held this July in California. We easily recall
the 1997 convention, which still relied almost exclusively on paper and press
releases. In succeeding three-year periods — that church holds its general synod
triennially — there would be some movement towards what the church considered
leading-edge technologies, but which were usually trailing-edge by the time
they were adopted. No doubt all 15 days of this General Convention will be
reported in a far more granular way than could have been imagined a decade ago,
via an onslaught of YouTube videos, official blogs and tweets,
with images, audio, and live webcasting right behind. It's all good, we suppose,
in the sense that it brings interested people closer to the primary sources,
to information that is less redacted than when packaged in a press release. The official compendium of documents to be studied before General Convention was traditionally mailed to deputies and bishops some months previous to it. Called the 'Blue Book' for the traditional colour of its cover, the ponderous soft cover tome was prone to bad binding and barely adequate indexing. It likely lay, forbidding and lumpen, on many a desk for weeks, holding as much allure as textbook of inorganic chemistry. The 2009 'Blue Book' now is available to all as a downloadable PDF, capable of being searched and annotated without ever leaving one's computer. This is a far better way to deliver dry reports and data, no matter how meaningful the substance might be, to the members of a synod. It would be hard to justify presenting the materials on India paper in morocco binding, even if budgets allowed it. The forward movement
of electrons seems irresistable — and the advantages can be compelling and clear.
But we do celebrate a quixotic print venture when we find it. Stumbling across Episcorific (not a name we find beguiling, but let that go) is surely reason for celebration. Described as 'a 'zine for and by the young adults of the Episcopal Church', this quarterly print magazine is available online as a free PDF. It began a year ago with an ambitious 24 pages more narrowly focussed on 'young adults in Texas', but it's now grown beyond those borders. Happily, since that first issue, it continues to be well designed and sassy looking in black-and-white. We're delighted at this new print communication and wish it well. Perhaps print, like old vinyl record albums, will hold an allure for those who didn't grow up with it. That might prove a very interesting development in the Church. No doubt, though, most national church quarterlies and parish magazines† will morph into web sites and then into blogs and tweets. How all that will work, we'll need to wait and see. We've no doubt that Anglicans will keep communicating, even if not on India paper. See you next week.
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It's hard to tell the fate of that
critically important activity. Perhaps some economic model will be found that
can support first-rate journalism online. Or there will be the magic solution
to making print pay, but we doubt that will serve for what we think of
as 'news'; it's more likely to be found for essays, in-depth articles, long
investigative stories, and the like.
