Fergus Cassidy

Paper chase

ONCE again I can thank my parents for keeping me out of trouble. Michael and Maura weren't conscious of it in any way, but the years spent growing up in a house where devotion to newspapers sat snugly alongside television - the new media of those times - have left their mark.

Back then shops were called newsagents. The local one was only ten doors away, which was lucky for me. Every evening, without fail, I was dispatched by my mother to get "the papers".

On occasion, the local shop would have sold out, but returning empty handed would not be good news. On to the bike and a two-mile round trip in search of the grail. If either the Herald or the Press were gone, then it was substituted with a daily. Bringing only one paper back was flirting with the obituary notices. A debt sentence at least.

We were a big newspaper family. We used them for cleaning windows; lighting fires; wrapping rubbish; wrapping fragiles; lining shelves; drying floors and, my speciality, stuffing football boots to dry them.

We read them too, but only after they had been liberated from my mother's blackened fingers. In a quiet room, Maura laid waste to the best that Abbey Street and Burgh Quay could throw at her. Broadsheets held no fear either to a self-taught origami oracle.

My father made his own dent on the print plinths stacked in the draught-ridden garage he liked to call his workshop. In this Aladdin's Cave of valves and transistors, he set about repairing a suburb's woes. His work mates called him 'The Doc', mostly because of his surname, but he treated those who called with sick televisions or radios as his patients.

Today my own house is bulging with yesterday's news and so many 'ON' lights I'm afraid airplanes will one day mistake for a runway. They only get turned off while on holidays, a time which saddens the ESB.

It's a legacy of growing up in a multimedia home. Nobody called it that, but that's what it was. Sure there was much crossover between television and newspapers, but there were also big differences. Not just the stories, but the way they were treated and presented. The pecking order of newsworthiness.

As television sets became cheaper and more user friendly, their rise became unstoppable and the end was supposed to be nigh for newspapers. Even health regulations brought a halt to fish and chip wrapping and a cliche along with it.

Newspapers survived television's threat, or challenge as Rupert Murdoch recently called it: "A new technology comes along, and like many new things, it is somewhat exciting at first, simply by virtue of being new. Like the advent of radio before it, television was always going to be at best an alternative way to get the news, and at worst a direct competitor...".

With another turn of technology's wheel, the internet is replacing television as a direct competitor to newspapers. In a speech last April to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Murdoch said that "scarcely a day goes by without some claim that new technologies are fast writing newsprint's obituary.

"Yet, as an industry, many of us have been remarkably, unaccountably complacent. I didn't do as much as I should have after all the excitement of the late 1990s. I suspect many of you in this room did the same, quietly hoping that this thing called the digital revolution would just limp along. Well it hasn't?it won't...".

Tony O'Reilly, another global newspaper player, has also gone on the offensive recently on the future of newspapers. "The enemies of the press say it is a sunset industry. I say it is a sunrise industry", he told the Sydney Morning Herald.

O'Reilly also said he and other newspaper owners were "very interested and concerned by the possible cannibalism that can emerge from the internet, especially classified advertising.

"But I can't see display advertising on the internet being a real factor in the future. Newspapers for the next 25 years will be the ultimate browser. They are tactile, portable and cheap and go well with a cup of coffee."

Advertising will be one of the main battlegrounds between papers and online media. A current report from PricewaterhouseCoopers in Australia, an important market for News Corporation and Independent, stated that "while newspaper publishers are at the forefront of online classifieds, they are still experiencing the beginnings of a re-routing of one of the three principal streams of the printed paper".

Newspapers have faced this race for revenue before. As a journalist writing through both media, I strongly believe that the either/or view is mistaken and a throwback to threats of the past. Because of this there is a danger that the opportunity for online and print media to interplay, strengthen and scold one another will be overlooked.

Gavin O'Reilly, Independent's chief operating officer and newly-elected president of the World Association of Newspapers, said at the organisation's annual general meeting that "people forget that newspapers have always been an interactive medium, people have always been able to interact with us through the mailbag".

My mother would have agreed vehemently, but that was a long time ago, in a land far far away.