It’s taken all of a week perched on the eastern tip of the Australian coastline to realise that a decent holiday has little to do with location and everything to do with connectivity – or, to be precise, the lack of it.
With a small house, a beach at the end of the lane, two sandy-fingered children and no Internet access, my laptop was always destined to become a heavy-weight quill whist my Blackberry keyboard simply spent its time crunching away like a packet of crisps before finally giving up the ghost on day two. Having dusted myself off from a mild state of e-d-tox I began to relish my new found state of obscurity and settled down for a life that felt a little like the Waltons sur meare. The family was very impressed. I’m not sure the office felt the same.
Top of my relaxation list was to reacquaint myself with the age-old art of reading the daily newspaper from cover to cover. I shouldn’t have bothered. As one of the world’s most time-zone challenged countries, Australia gets much of its news 24 hours late. Not even events of global magnitude can find a way around that. The Tuesday Obama inauguration story was run in full on Thursday morning. Reading about it was a bit like plonking yourself down on a windswept beach only to be told that yesterday’s weather was simply glorious.
And what wasn’t redundant by time-zone, was redundant by content. The news from corporate Australia was grim. Forget those who tell you its better to sit out a business recession in the sunshine – gloomy news is gloomy news regardless of how sparkly the warm waters of the Australian coastline look.
And so my intellectual and educational default came from an increasingly battered copy of the weekend broadsheet – a publication so large, the children were able to make a tent, campsite, small fire and mock-up surrounding forest from it without me really noticing. What made it such a natural reference point was that it was a thousand pages of opinion and very little news. Which made for interesting reading indeed.
Since Mr Morse first started finger-tapping, media moguls have long realised that to be news, news has to be new. Facts have a habit of changing over short periods of time which is why being told something that is already out of date tends to niggle those who care. And most care.
Fast-forward to 2009 and the current crop of digital advocates continue to predict the death of the newspaper. Of course you only need look at decreasing advertising revenues to see that they have a point. But, for my money, it’s a false economy to assume print is on its last legs. Particularly weekend print.
Online forums may be the digital version of the opinion piece but I’m not entirely convinced such content is as accessible as your blogger on the Clapham Digibus would suggest. Fighting through the Sunday Cornflakes and spilt milk to boot up, search for the right web page, scroll to the appropriate article and expect the children to simply ignore me tapping away on the laptop is a nonsense. It would be red-rag chaos. Try the same process on the beach, and said laptop would soon be sized up as a spade. In the garden, the page would be invisible. In the bath, I’d be moments from death. etc etc. You get the point.
Not withstanding any future technical limitations what that probably means is that online will increasingly dominate the delivery of 24/7 news; TVs and radio will become PCs, albeit in the format of a familiar looking box so as not to offend the easily offended; specialist publications will run side by side with online user groups, each meeting the very particular needs of niche audiences; and weekend newspapers, brimming with a point of view, will flourish.
For the smart content provider that means having a toe in every camp and connecting them all through a single, trusted brand. ‘Monocle’ is a case in point: monthly magazine; live, weekly website broadcast; 24/7 web presence; retail outlet for branded goods; and linked column in the Weekend FT. All intelligent, connected opinion that stays consistent on content and provides its audience with access through a suite of channels that acknowledges the difference in audience access preference.
And so after a week on a beach with a young family and little connection with the modern world, I’m putting my ill-researched neck out and stating that the well formatted weekend newspaper is here to stay. That’s because opinion – well thought out and considered opinion – doesn’t really date over the course of a week. It matures, provokes debate and encourages a different point of view. It wallows in its analysis and if, quite frankly, that’s not enough to convince you the fact that it makes a great two-man tent must surely swing the vote in its favour.
