Newspaper Revival
via SFGate
It looks like Newspapers aren’t going down without a fight, and San Francio writer Dave Eggers is their corner-man. Eggers, along with a group of writers in are putting out a single-issue newspaper called the “San Francisco Panorama” with the hopes of having people realize the value of newspapers and the printed word.
As a former journalism student, Eggers was horrified to hear that newspapers were on the down and out. Afraid that he one day might lose picking up the newspaper form the doorstep, he set out on a mission to show people just how great newspapers can be.
The one-shot papers is going to be massive, with dimensions of 15 x 22 inches and over 300 pages of content, including stories and comics written by Stephen King and Art Spiegelman, respectively. The paper will have sections covering news, arts, sports, and food, as well as over 100 pages devoted to books. Stories range from the elections in Afghanistan to how to make the perfect bowl of ramen noodles.
While I recognize a lot of the positives about this, I can’t help but feel a few glaring negatives about it as well. We’ll start with the good – getting all of these great writers and artists together under one roof is fantastic, and the literary quality of the paper is unquestionable. Also, having such diverse coverage shows people the variety of information and entertainment they can get out of those gray pages.
However, I feel that having this be a single-issue paper is proof positive of the death of newspapers. What makes a newspaper a newspaper is not just the kind of paper it’s printed on, it’s the continued production of said paper, coming out weekly or even daily. It’s kind of ironic, actually, that this newspaper intended to revive people’s interest in the printed word is only happening once, as if it were a failure before it even began. I can see it now – readers being enthralled and looking foward to the next issue only to discover that there isn’t one. If Eggers really wanted to show people the true potential of newspapers, having only one issue isn’t going to cut it. There’s so much that goes on in production of a newspaper that it cannot be grasped in the making (or reading) of just one issue.
