Maybe the future isn’t that dark after all?

Came in this morning to the following e-mail from my fellow book lover and Spokane attorney Rich Kuhling:

“Cover article this week’s Economist : ‘Who Killed the Newspaper?’

“Reading it I can’t help but think that printing killed vellum and illumination but journalism blossomed. The net and merging media may kill many newspapers, but intuition says there will be more need than ever for journalist and editors – aggregators and filters of information in the information age. It will just look a little different.

“Sitting in your office, do you perceive yourself as a monk in the abbey about to be sprung loose on the world?”

Here’s how I answered:

Rich: I think the best commentary on the “power” of the Internet media world came with the whole “Snakes on a Plane” story.

For months, stories had been running about how the blogosphere had helped market the film. Bloggers had even forced the filmmakers to make the film more violent and sexy, and they’d stopped them from changing the name to the far more mundane “Pacific Air 121.”

The projections were that the movie would make $100 million because of the bloggers. In addition, it signaled the ostensible end of classical movie criticism because when the fans are helping shape the movies, who cares what critics think? They hate everything anyway, right?

So what happens? The movie opens and makes not quite $14 million. Even now at the end of its second week of release, it’s made just $27.5 million.

There are several things you can deduce from this. One, the blogging world has a lot less influence on the overall movie audience than the hype led us to believe. Two, there’s only so much appeal for obviousness, especially when it comes in a title . Three, by making the movie R-rated, the producers turned away from the film’s natural audience – 15-year-old boys.

But the important thing for me is what you allude to: There will always be room in whatever shape journalism takes for thoughtful, incisive, well-written essays.

You’ll always have the talking TV and podheads and their tendencies to talk in blacks and whites. You’ll have the Drudge world and its reporting of rumors passing as actual news.

But even though the Web is changing reading habits … many Web readers might already have lost patience and stopped reading a couple of graphs ago … some people will always want more.

The fact that I can post this mini-essay on my own blog, and likely will, is a sign that I, too, am benefiting from the freedom that Internet journalism affords us all.

What I can’t control is anyone’s desire to read it. I can only hope that whatever I have to say will find the audience interested in considering matters from my point of view. And if we can then get an intelligent dialogue going, then I’ll feel as if I’ve done my job.

— Dan