The Times and the Tablet

I feel a little sad in a bemused, contemptuous way, having just read that The New York Times may be putting all or some of its content behind a paywall simultaneously with the coming launch of the rumored Apple tablet computer. These guys! They're as smart as they can be, and as good at what they do as anyone, but they just don't see the obvious—they think that if they just latch on to the right platform, the newspaper can come back, the same as it ever was.

 A lot of newspaper and magazine people refuse to see that the Internet was a millennial change in communications technology—it changed everything, including the kind of content people want and will pay for from the media. I suppose the Times execs who think the tablet will save them are stuck indefinitely in the denial stage of death. And I guess they imagine that when Apple brings out its tablet, all of the sudden people will be reading the Times again at the breakfast table, or standing up in the subway, holding the grab bar in one hand and the tablet in the other, reading the Times. And people will pay for the Times again because they always wanted it all along, the same as it ever was, but on a computer, with videos and slideshows and so forth. And if the staffers can't do that stuff, shoot, just get some intern to do it. How hard can it be, right?

It reminds me of some poor sap who thinks a lover will come back some day. I actually heard Steve Lopez, a popular columnist, railing on the radio about the newspaper business like he was a jilted boyfriend. "You'll miss us when we're gone!" he said. It was sad. Lovers and customers leave because they don't want you or your product. You think they really want and need what you have to offer, and they simply don't understand that they want and need it. They're temporarily confused and deluded, but in time they'll realize and come back.

But they don't, do they? Not very often. If you think and expect they will, the deluded one is you. It's not stupidity—smart people do this denial stuff all the time. But the tablet computer will not magically revive periodical publishing and it won't bring back the buggy whip industry either. Ask Jack Shafer if you don't believe me. I wish it could—I was a newspaper and magazine guy in the happiest years of my life, and I'd love to see it come back the way it was. I wish it would. But it won't. Adapt or die—that's the only thing that's the same as it ever was.