Introducing: The Usepaper
I believe I have a solution to the problems besetting the newsprint industry. The chief issue, I feel certain, has to do not with print or newsprint as such, but with the actual articles being printed on the newsprint.
My modest proposal is that newspapers for a time experiment with publishing their titles without the dubious benefit of the kind of journalism they have been peddling lately, or indeed any kind of journalism at all. I have in mind publishing newspapers without the articles. If we can eliminate the content of newspapers we are halfway to solving the problem.
Yes, I do mean publishing blanks sheets of newsprint —or perhaps not exclusively blank sheets, perhaps some sheets could have other kind of content, like advertising or cartoons.
Whereas analysis of this question tends to assume that people buy newspapers for their content, my belief is that far more people than is recognised have been buying newspapers for the newsprint, defined as ‘cheap, low-quality absorbent printing paper made from coarse wood pulp and used chiefly for newspapers.’
Contrary to cliché, newsprint is not merely good for wrapping fish and chips. It appears to be forgotten that, not along ago, yesterday’s newspaper was among the most useful technologies a household could keep to hand. I admit myself astonished that there is not more talk about the great loss that is represented by this aspect of newspaper decline, and can only conclude that some kind of omertà surrounds the adaptability of the newspaper, probably a conspiracy by journalists seeking to protect their turf. Now that said turf is well and truly scorched, perhaps we can again admit the truth: that for a very long time the last thing we have been buying newspapers for was their content.
Although I have sworn off buying newspapers for some years now, I have until recently maintained a practice of taking a couple of freebies whenever I stay in hotels — until recently when it struck me that, all the time, these ‘freebies’ were being counted in the circulation figures of newspapers that I regarded as otherwise unfit for purpose.
My late, great Irish colleague, Con Houlihan, one of the world’s greatest ever sportswriters, was a long-time holdout against the typewriter, insisting on writing his copy in pencil on sheets of newsprint purloined from the Irish Press printing works, downstairs from the newsroom. He would write one glittering sentence per page and then spread the pages around his livingroom floor, shifting and switching until he found the optimal sequence, little guessing that he had anticipated the word processor by several decades. Rarely since then has newsprint been appropriated to so useful a purpose.
But it can be put to many other ends: lining the bird cage; wrapping a bouquet of Valentine roses; masking floors when housepainting; cleaning windows (dipping the newsprint in vinegar helps); providing extra buoyancy as additional layers of carpet underlay; laying on the floor to soak up the mess from defrosting the fridge; cleaning out the ashes from wood burning stoves; wrapping crockery and other fragile items when moving house; germinating seeds; covering children’s schoolbooks; drying out your boots overnight when it rains (stuff them full of newsprint and place beside a radiator — by morning the newsprint will have absorbed all the moisture); as a biodegradable shroud in which to bury dead pets: cleaning your spectacles (my father, who never swore about anything, swore by this); house-training pets; making papier-mâché; improvised low-carbon firelighters; protecting windscreen from overnight icing; making soldier hats for children’s parties; and (joke alert) composing blackmail/ransom notes.
And you can wrap your fish and chips in it.
Broadsheets are obviously better for almost all of the above-listed functions, raising the astonishing possibility that the recent exponential growth of the giveaway Evening Standard may be down to the quality of its journalism.
Almost every one of the functions listed above involves also what advertising executives almost certainly call ‘consumer exposure’, with the possible exception of cleaning your spectacles. I can only speak for myself, but without mine I am as blind as the blind Jorge Luis Borges without his walking cane (a Borgesian joke of sorts: if you don’t get it, please move on without self-recrimination.)
But the fish-wrap cliché may have been instrumental in blocking the industry’s view of a major growth potential of news-free newspapers, or usepapers. As a rule, the class of punter consuming fish and chips from yesterday’s newspaper tends to be the worse for wear after a night on the tiles, and therefore not necessarily the best targets for advertisers. But, while excavating the ashes from the bowels of our wood burning stoves we tend to be in a ruminative and unhurried mindset, and therefore perfectly primed to become obedient consumers of, for example, bigger and better wood-burning stoves. Similarly with laying carpets, wrapping crockery, or even defrosting the fridge freezer. This opens up the radical and explosive possibility that the usepaper, while carrying no news or other articles, might well become a serious moneyspinner for the houses of our once titan titles, publishing not the news fit to print but all the news fit to omit.
Who among us, even occasionally charged with the care of small children, would not pay a tech billionaire’s ransom for large sheets of blank paper on a rainy day? (‘Step right up! Get your Usepaper here! Free box of crayons with every copy!’)
This may not be flattering of my former colleagues, now switched from journalists to journaliars, but it is not intended satirically. I do not intend necessarily that the usepaper will permanently replace the newspaper. Rather, I believe its presence in the marketplace will enable new generations of ethically-inclined and idealistic journalists to emerge and fill the blank spaces. The fact that this will not be essential to the industry’s business model will serve to protect the ethics and idealism: they won’t need to write whole reams of lies to fill things out.
It has been remarked more than once (at least once by me) that, had the current wave of technology come before the advent of newsprint, we would be astonished and greatly excited by the flexibility offered by the newspaper. Unlike an iPad, you can fold a newspaper, roll it up, sit on it, lie on it, put it in your pocket without worrying that you may be doing permanent damage. With a newspaper, there is no such thing as permanent damage, except that inflicted by bad journalism.
It’s not an accident that those seeking to replace the newspaper at the street corner have focused on interactive digital paper that can be rolled and folded. The very possibility that this may come to something is promising: perhaps, given a second chance, the newspaper could rise again and offer our democracies the possibility of a genuine conversation.
The chief difficulty besetting the newspaper, therefore, may be one of chronology: it came too soon. Perhaps, then, it needs simply to go away, take a longish break, and then come back with a faint rustle as though it had never existed before.