Digesting change – now there’s a little pun you can sink your teeth into today………. I was just reading through the definitions of “digest” and had to chuckle to myself. The news today is, for me, hard to digest – like the pace of change these days…..
I just finished reading the New York Times articles on the sale of the Washington Post to Jeff Bezos. This is just after I read, on Sunday, the feature article in the Sunday Styles Section about Katherine Weymouth – granddaughter of Katherine Graham and her ambition to keep the Post alive and, well, “well”. Boy, that world changed quickly – that’s all of barely one day! Granted, that all was in the works long before (apparently July) the Times went to press on Saturday, but wow – that was a quick one.
To think that in one week we could see reporting of the sale of the Washington Post and the Boston Globe for small fractions of what they were once worth in the media world, and then the relatively gargantuan hulla-balloo about A-Rod – for weeks, months and years now, in the world of baseball – sorry, this creates a huge case of ageda for me. The relative time spent on these two stories – the front-page feature story in the WSJ today is on A-Rod and the sale of the Post got a nibble halfway down the Business and Finance column and an article trickling off the lower right hand corner. This is a real wake up call – with tons of coverage, and editorializing on the A-Rod situation- really? Then, on the front pages today, the much more impactful changes in our world of media seem more like an epithaph, like a train that was known to be coming and is just finally pulling into the station…… a foregone conclusion, add it to the list of has-beens, omg, no!
I think today is the actual day I fully internalized that life as I’ve known it is going, going, gone (kind of like A-rod and Barry Bonds before him (and the others) and Lance Armstrong – now you see them, now you don’t – gone to or on their way to irrelevancy (that’s tongue-in-cheek – I’m not comparing the Post and the Globe to those knuckle-heads – but, you get the point). Not that people won’t reminisce about the Post and the Globe, they’ll be remembered fondly – sort of like Ovaltine or Maypo – another tongue-in-cheek analogy. (eeks is the Times next?) I may be one of only a few who are sad about the rumbling-with-a-head-of- steam-demise of print media – except of course, all the people whose jobs have been/will be lost……. On Friday the Boston Globe was sold. Gourmet’s gone, Waitrose Food – the old version, and on and on. Even Martha Stewart Living, that modern-day bastion of the how-to-do-it-all bible of the last 23 years is apparently struggling. But, I have been able to see for a long time that the generation which my kids are in (ages 24 and 21) couldn’t care less about “the newspaper” , the kind where the ink stains your fingers or most, if not all print media, for that matter. In fact, I wonder if the pen and pencil aren’t the next staples of life to go by the wayside. In all actuality, the number of times I pick up a pen these days to “write” something is severely diminished………
When I listen to CNBC, and I do a lot now while I am in the car – now that Martha Stewart’s radio station is gone, too (say what you want about her but I have learned a lot from Martha and I really liked the food and garden segments of her radio programming), I find myself wondering if anyone is doing a net-job-change calculation on all these media/tech changes – there are surely many, many new jobs which have been created to get all this digital space going – in addition to the editors and writers, there are the advertisers and web designers, etc. and all of their staffs, no? And now all those, what used to be called “gum shoe” reporters, well are they there or are they going the way of the dinosaur, too? I believe the reporters or the statisticians don’t do a very good job counting and, the other “Ben, as in Bernanke, could do us well in trying to measure the net job increase from tech in general, so as to, in the interest of putting a lid on the rabble-rousing and, dare I say it, players of their little sly (very obvious) politically shaded “commentarians” on CNBC, in dumping on the economy. As we all know objective reporting is a rarity these days, perhaps we should add it to the list of the extinct – but I am getting ahead of myself here.
In any event, it would be nice to have something positive to report amidst all the negativity around. No more wrestling around the news room like Ben Bradlee and Woodward and Bernstein – everyone’s reporting from their virtual office or in their pjs in their apartments! We all know that the digital age is upon us – creating new technologies we didn’t know we needed yesterday and making them indispensible by the end of today – all the while sucking up bricks and mortar retail jobs, vacating office and mall space and all sorts of collateral “effects”. I won’t call it damage – because I can’t “see” the net effect, not yet. But, what I’m talking about is the way of life that’s changing and the, ugh, I hate to use this over-used phrase, “the new normal” as long as you accept that the new normal lasts about as long as it takes to say it. These days the new normal only lasts a day or two and the idea that something would even transit from gen x to gen y is, well, passé. I think we are on gen z now – what comes after that?
Like the horse and buggy, the Edsel, the rabbit-eared tv, the land line, and soon to be the tv in the traditional sense, the changes, they are a-coming, and rapidly so. Gone is the mainframe, the card sets, the teletype, the Morse Code, the pony express, the Western Union office and soon to be the post office, I guess. I find myself somewhat dismayed and running hard to try to keep pace – just a little, just as much as I can, so that I, too won’t be left in the dust. My goal is to survive just until they perfect the time machine and I step inside before I get my third artificial hip.
Yesterday, they were discussing test tube meat on tv. Well, I thought, we went from test tube babies to test tube meat – yikes! My guess is that this technology has been around for a long while and is surfacing just now for a number of related but carefully calculated circumstances. I just can’t go there, sorry. Maybe I won’t be around for that one – I sort of hope not. Frankly I can’t see myself walking the aisles of Whole Foods and trying to sort through the meat from “real cows – corn-fed, grass fed and tube-fed, and the GMOs. I’m sticking with the Farmers’ Markets for as long as I can.
Sadly, though, I find myself clinging to my old ways, my old loves, the way I’ve done things forever. There are a lot of good things that are becoming obsolete, aren’t there? I like to sit and read the newspaper every day and not online. I don’t like reading on a tablet. And, I don’t want to watch tv on a computer. I still love my cookbooks, the real ones with pages you can turn and spill cake batter all over. What happens when one finds oneself caught up in the middle of a revolution? I like putting “old-fashioned” yeast in a bowl and proofing it – not using the rapid rise one.
Maybe I have reached the tipping point. You see, I am old enough to remember where I was sitting when President Kennedy was assassinated, and MLK and RFK. I remember watching the funerals on tvs with rabbit ears. I remember when you had to walk to school (huh?) when you got a job before you had working papers (that’s 13), and later, when “Tricky Dicky” and his merry men battled it out with the Washington Press Corps and he ultimately flew off after that now famous “salute”. I remember hiding in the stairwells in the 3rd grade in preparation for bomb attacks during the Cold War and the Bay of Pigs. I remember Vietnam and my cousins all worrying about their lottery draft numbers. When I discussed the realities of a draft with my son’s carpool buddies years ago now, and asked them what they would do if the draft was reinstated, they all scoffed at me. They had no frame of reference, no perspective, no sense of evolution. Just like my kids now have no recollection of life before computers and cell phones. Well, well. Maybe I have reached my tolerance of change for one lifetime? Maybe, yes, but really no. I am anxious to go on and see the new morning, however hard it may be to digest.
Well, all this by way of saying I for one am sorry a little and glad a little. I am sorry for the bookstore owners who are no longer in business because the UPS man just delivered a book to me from Amazon. At the same time I love my laptop, cell phone and nav system and all the benefits they afford me. Even I wouldn’t want to be without these gadgets in the future. And I love Huff Post Taste and all my food-related blogs and “friends” online. I am so benefiting from them.
I respect Jeff Bezos for what he has built, I do. I take advantage of his Company’s benefits all the time. I do hope he will keep the Post alive and open and relevant. Same for the Globe. But, my optimism may be just a little misguided, no?
But when it comes to meat, I will, as a confirmed carnivore, keep the light alive. Who would have ever thought they’d be talking about a day when we wouldn’t need cows, pigs, goats, chickens, fish, ducks, sheep and ??? anymore.
As for A-Rod and his fellow classmates of the generation-steroid, au-revoir. They were given a chance of a life-time and blew it – the people who built those newspapers built something real, over generations with sweat and hard work and diligence. Hats off to them and their fore-bearers.
I know we’ve had the “box cake” for a very long time now. Should I be preparing myself for the “test-tube” cake, test-tube pies, test-tube macaroons……. ?
I think I’ll have a glass of wine now, before it, too is grown and fermented in a test tube…………….