The Death of the Old Media - 14 January 2000

In America anyway the 21st century came in with a bang. A sound so loud and so new that I'd guess most people, most people over 60, suddenly felt they were living on a different planet or had, like Rip Van Winkle, been asleep for 20 years and came awake to discover that their world was beyond recognition.

I detect, by extra sensory perception or a shudder in the radio signal, I detect a slight attack in some listeners of shyness. So I'll cure it at once by going directly to the cause.

Does anybody read Washington Irving any more? In blunter words, a question hovering on many lips I'm sure: who is Rip Van Winkle?

Before oldsters smirk with impatience and roar "What nonsense. Of course we read Washington Irving when we were children", let me remind you of my frequent researches in this matter of assuming that every young person around shares your cultural or folk background and then adds his or her own.

I asked a grandson of mine - in his 20s, very bright, also (better) very intelligent - who was Charlie Chaplin?

"Er," he said, "his name comes up in crossword puzzles."

And so I learned from other 20-something-year-olds do the names of Albert Schweitzer, Sigmund Freud and Winston Churchill.

Winston Churchill! A stunning item of disbelief till I recalled an early Gallup poll taken in England in the autumn of 1940 - now note the year and the time - when, if the besieged or surrendered free world had a hero it was Churchill standing with or for Britain alone against Hitler's armies on the French shore.

Dr Gallup took a poll of the general population of England - of England only - asking the simple question: "Who is Winston Churchill?"

And Dr Gallup, I remember at the time, was scolded for bad taste but his distinction was to be the first man to want to find out what the people really felt and not what editors or public men told us they felt. His strength was to ask rude questions that went like a stake through the heart of preconceptions and popular false assumptions.

Well 96% of the English population knew all or much about Churchill. But 4% had never heard of him. They were farmers. Most, if not all, had no radio and they all lived in one county. Its identity was never published.

So far as I know it remained a secret known only to Dr Gallup, as the identity of the Washington Post's Deep Throat is locked still in the bosom of the editor of the Post at the time of Watergate.

By the way I wonder how many people know the identity of the retired BBC executive who was, in semi-retirement, appointed to be the policy advisor to the director general. He was known as Deep Thought.

Well all this flowed naturally from my rude assumption that quite a lot of listeners don't know or have forgotten the incomparable tale of Rip Van Winkle and secretly would like to know it.

In brief here it is. First I should say, so nobody will be embarrassed from now on, Washington Irving was an American essayist and historian born at the end of the 18th century and lived through the first half of the 19th. He wrote a comic history of New York from the beginning of the world to the end of the Dutch dynasty, supposedly written by one Diedrich Knickerbocker. The book was so popular that the name, the moniker "Knickerbocker", became a synonym for a New Yorker.

Irving was, at one time, American minister to Spain and he wrote four volumes on its history. He retired in the Hudson Valley and he wrote true or invented folk tales about that part of the state, the most famous of which was that of a middle-aged Dutchman, Rip Van Winkle.

Rip Van Winkle's wife was described as a termagant. He himself was in no doubt that he was henpecked, that maybe his popularity, maybe, you never know, was in his appearing as the champion of every henpecked husband throughout the republic.

Rip did what many of them had longed to do. One day he upped and he left home with his dog and went wandering in the Catskill Mountains. This was just before the colonies rebelled and started the War of Independence.

Rip met a dwarf carrying a large keg and Rip helped him with it and together they came into a valley where dwelt a group or tribe of dwarfs.

Rip was invited to celebrate his arrival with these new friends, none of whom - so far as he could see - had a henpecking wife. He drank a long, sustaining drink and he fell asleep.

He woke up 20 years later to find many bewildering changes.

He himself was now an old man. He limped back to his town and he found - hallelujah! - his termagant wife dead, his daughter married and a hanging portrait of King George III replaced by a portrait of who? Whom? Of another King George.

In actual fact - I should explain - a senator from Massachusetts, attending the inauguration of George Washington, noted with misgiving that Washington did not like to be touched or shake hands. He required people to stand in his presence. He intended to hold levees or royal receptions.

"I fear," whispered the senator, "we have exchanged George III for George I."

But of course Rip Van Winkle learned that though there'd been several moves to make him emperor - one suggestion was His Magnificence - he became plain President Washington.

But everything around Rip's house and his town - all the news and the talk - all new, all Greek to poor Rip.

Well that's the way some of us felt when we read the thundering news last Tuesday: "The death of the old media."

It says here we are seeing the beginning of the end of the bookstore, the auction house, the yard sale, the real estate agent, the insurance man, the post office, the bulletin board, the newspaper, the radio broadcaster - ouch! - the private club and, I should add, the blessed anchor of our daily life: the retail shop or store - what the young folks who spent Christmas week ordering their presents online call "the old bricks and mortar."

What I'm talking about is the staggering news that a company thought to be wobbling - with however a booming share price but likely, any minute, to be gobbled up by Mr Gates's Microsoft - this smallish company bought a huge company whose share price has lagged behind the market all through the boom, a company riddled with debt - this was suddenly bought by this smallish company which paid 70% more for the debt-ridden giant's shares than the market thought them worth.

This acquisition of Time Warner by America Online is being hailed as a brilliant formula, not for rescuing staggering companies, but for unimaginable success as an institution that will date and replace all those institutions we've been so cosy with for - well - say, 200 years.

One financial paper calls it the "$164bn riddle". It is certainly a riddle wrapped in an enigma - or the other way round to most of us who don't spend half our days hanging out on the internet.

The Wall Street Journal made the best attempt at defining exactly what this enigma is. And here is the enlightening passage.

Maybe I ought to say before I recite it that much of the language of this piece will be strange to many of the middle aged and the older still. It may sound like jargon, that is to say the vague, pretentious, tortured English used by ignoramuses, highbrows, pompous businessmen, sociologists, art critics and most politicians.

But it isn't, it's something quite different - professional trade talk as exact as a doctor's professional talk.

Well, having said that, what this merger constitutes is "all the things it will replace - newspapers, books, television networks, post offices, retail chains, etc." the piece says:

"It is all of the above or if you prefer none of them. It is at its core an architecture, a set of digital protocols - rules and structures, some of them proprietary, some internet-based - embedded in software, running on servers and linked up to networks.

"Amazon.com has done it to the bookstore and hopes to do it to the rest of retailing, eBay is doing it to the auction house and the yard sale.

"AOL is doing it to a broad swathe of messaging, chatter, publishing and broadcasting.

"And how about Time Warner what part will it play? Well the parts - its parts - that really matter to this merger represent a grab bag of old analogue content - CNN, Time Magazine, Warner Brothers, music groups, a television network - all perfectly good businesses, well managed, generally profitable but still very old wine.

"They'll hang around for another decade or so but they're history. AOL is the new bottle and for the next decade, at least, the new digital bottlers will be in complete control."

Is that quite clear? No?

Well the good news came next day with a consoling second thought that it won't all change by next month. Writers as splendid as Tom Wolfe and as humble as yours truly who bang out their stuff on old manual typewriters will still compose prose and have it - hope to have it - printed between hard covers and hope you'll read it. Better still buy it.

But hurry, before they tear down the old neighbouring bricks and mortar.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

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