I would like to know the future of news media. With the crash of News International in Britain following the phone hacking scandal inevitably leading to a loss of faith in journalism and union strikes in France potentially forcing Le Monde online the future of newspapers in print format is surely in doubt.
In fact, in a world where Kindle sales continue to rise and the book shop giant that was Borders is closing down, is there much hope for the printed word at all? It seems evidence from studies suggest that there is a relationship between the reader and the codex form due to the tactile pleasure of holding a book that goes back to primitive tool use. Whilst Kindle sales increase many of us still prefer the old-fashioned book but novels are evolving in a way that newspapers surely cannot. There's a novel that is cut out entirely from another novel leaving spaces so you can glimpse the future plotlines through the spaces between the remaining words and Danielewski's House of Leaves breaks all the rules of page structure set out by early novelists such as Defoe and Dickens. Books like these are re-invigorating the novel making them more akin to works of art than simple stories.
In the current environmental climate it also seems that perhaps it is time to stop inefficiently printing papers and simply release them online. This, of course, is by no means perfect. It still necessitates electricity and there's something of a bygone era that the opening of a freshly printed newspaper evokes. Besides, newspapers are as much a part of our heritage as fish and chips, tea and Shakespeare and for news stands to disappear from our street corners would be a terrible shame.
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