“PRINT IS DEAD, LONG LIVE PRINT”
AN OPEN LETTER TO THE MURDERERS OF INDEPENDENT MEDIA
IN PITTSBURGH AND EVERYWHERE
FROM AN EXTREMELY PISSED-OFF YOUNG PERSON
DEAR [_____],
The resurgence of print isn't coming.
It’s already here.
People like Allan Block, CEO of Block Communications Inc., have zero sense of what's coming. They’re too focused on the wrong kind of paper: greenbacks.
Block Communications, parent company of the recently-shuttered City Paper and the to-be-shuttered Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, said in a press release that the "realities facing local journalism make continued cash losses at this scale no longer sustainable.”
To that I say: Your complete lack of vision and millions spent on union busting, according to union leaders, are part and parcel of those cash losses. Your actions create many of the realities facing local journalism, damaging the livelihood of hard-working journalists and the cities they serve.
If you nurture a plant, it will grow.
If you starve a plant, it will die.
Print may be coughing up a death rattle now, and you think it's gone forever. You think you’re following the future.
What you’re really following is a rubber band. That rubber band is going to snap back and smack you in the face.
YOU CAN’T SEE WHAT WE CAN.
Everyone I know, especially in my generation, is sick and tired of social media and the internet. Our primary source of culture is an AI-filled, hate-fueled algorithmic nightmare and we continue to scroll the slop trough anyways.
This is because WE have not yet been presented with an engaging alternative.
Print media, magazines especially, are strong, highly visual ways to reflect truth and art in culture: words and images both created and curated by creative minds and relatable thinkers. The work itself stands out, not because of hate clicks and engagement, but because of how it speaks to our souls.
Magazines are more than just words and pictures on a page. They’re an experience, a community, a guide to better ways of being.
Print media is a guide to being human that we can hold in our hands, bend, fold, rip, tear—, a tangible stronghold in an increasingly dissonant digital landscape.
Listen to the Print is Dead, Long Live Print podcast by Magazeum. Look up Cultured, Polyester, AFM, and Bricks magazines. Do some research and you’ll see what I’m talking about.
For independent Pittsburgh news and entertainment, check out PGH Manifold, Public Source, QBURGH, and DEJA Magazine. There’s a lot of work to be done but there’s hardworking people who are willing to do it.
As long as there are people who really believe in the power of something, it will never lay down and die.