Go back to Arts & Features pageSAN FRANCISCO -- In the world that most Americans inhabit, information comes through the ether. But there's still a demographic slice that can't live without the written word. Cable TV and radio waves don't do it for them. Their information gets to them by truck.
Trucks are what this newspaper strike is all about. There are other noteworthy issues (such as the Guild's radical demand that the extraordinary value that skilled librarians provide to an organization based on information be reflected in their pay), but at bottom, it's trucks.
The people who publish the newspapers feel foolish paying middle-class salaries plus benefits to union truck drivers when they could be paying a dime a paper to a fleet of recent immigrants who own their own cars and who probably never ever get sick. The people who drive the trucks are fighting to keep their way of life.
It's a more desperate struggle than most people expected it to be, and has already been marked by a disenchanting level of violence and meanness. We're not seeing many people cover themselves with glory.
But beyond the ugliness, what is deeply troubling about this strike is that no matter how it is ultimately resolved, the central issue is not going to go away. Because this is becoming clear: the trucks are in trouble. Cheaper ways of distributing the written word are taking root.
You couldn't ask for a clearer example of this than Time- Warner's new service, Pathfinder. This behemoth has been lurking quietly on the net for a month or two. (It's on the World Wide Web; the URL is http://www.timeinc.com/; don't forget the trailing slash.) It's clearly still in the experimental stages, so expect delays, glitches, and pages "under construction."
It's a huge experiment. Actually, it's several different experiments under the same nameplate.
Time magazine's presence here is the biggest. You can read the most recent issue of Time, which is online in its entirety. You can also read every back issue of the magazine for the last year. They've also up up a little database engine that you can use to search through those back issues.
Vibe magazine is online too, though not as completely as Time. (There isn't the library of back issues, or the search facility.) There are digests of stories from Entertainment Weekly, Money, and other Time-Warner publications.
And there's The Virtual Garden. This may be of more narrow interest, but it gives a picture of where Time- Warner is going with this.
The Virtual Garden includes gardening material from a number of magazines in Time-Warner's empire, including Sunset and Southern Progress. It also includes an online version of the Time-Life Complete Gardener, with a very cool searchable database of plants. Essentially, it's a completely new product made by repackaging related material from existing products.
Pathfinder's pretty big. And when you stop to consider how much information Time-Warner has dominion over (let's not forget Fortune, Sports Illustrated, People, and the entire stable of Time-Life books, to say nothing of the rest of the vast communications empire of which Time- Warner is a part), it's clear that while this service may look enormous, it's really just scratching the surface.
Pathfinder is not just dabbling. It's not a small-scale experiment by a media outlet that thinks that maybe they should play with this Internet stuff while they hammer out a long-term plan. The masthead credits 20 people. As they say about movies, you can see the money on the screen. It's pretty clear that they have a long-term plan already.
Time-Warner appears to believe that the net is going to mature into something that they can make a lot of money with. And they're going to be there when it does.
What's also clear from this that Time-Warner is looking ahead to the day when they don't need to trouble themselves with the trucks. That sounds radical, and unlikely, but I'm slowly coming to believe that it's not as unlikely as it seems.
Consider how rapidly and thoroughly things are changing online. The major online services are booming. All of them are offering connections to the Internet. All of them are struggling to support World Wide Web access. In the last year, a million copies of Mosaic, the most popular graphical Web browser, have been downloaded from the net.
The number of people on the net itself continues to grow. How quickly it's growing is a matter of some debate, but it's clearly growing much, much faster than the number of people who, say, read magazines and newspapers.
Maybe the online world isn't going to give serious competition to print media this year. But next year? In five years?
This new world of publishing is a world without paper. And it's a world without trucks, and without the salaries and benefits paid to the people that drive them. It's fuelled by yet another in a line of technological advances that have, over the last thirty years, helped dismantle the American working middle class.
This all may be exciting and new, and it may be cheaper and better, but we should at least give some thought to this: America without its working middle class is a nation that is weaker, poorer, less cohesive, and more dangerous. Just look around.
I'm rbr@well.sf.ca.us.
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