The Brave New World of the Internet

My late stepfather, Kirk Scharfenberg, was a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist with The Boston Globe. For years, as an Op-Ed columnist, then Metro Editor, he wrote opinion pieces and edited and mentored dozens of Globe journalists. Our home in Dorchester during Kirk's heyday with the paper was always full of journalists, politicos, and fellow travelers. It was a very stimulating environment for a young high school student like myself. So, it was with some sadness that I, along with many other fans of the paper, learned that The Globe may be shuttered by its parent company The New York Times. The Sunday paper has upwards of 350,000 subscribers so, we're told, it's not a subscription issue. It's a problem with the business model.

A problem with the business model?

I don't know about you, but there is something very special about the feel of the newspaper in your hands that cannot be replicated in Boston.com. Randy and I are both big Red Sox fans and there's nothing quite like reading the Globe sports page. The obits of The Globe are jokingly referred to as "the Irish sports pages" and, for a certain generation who don't even necessarily own a computer, they have long been considered required reading over the morning cup of joe. So, the threat to the Globe got me thinking about the ways - large and small - that I have had to adapt to the whims of technology as a teacher and writer.

The Script Sages have started to both "blog" and now "tweet" (we're up to 38 followers in under two weeks on Twitter!); we have embraced the technology in the hope of jumpstarting the business model of promoting our work as writers quickly and cheaply. Before that, perhaps like the (so it seems now) old fashioned Globe, we thought we could simply write and send out our scripts--and this was the business model. No longer, as we've learned that writing to succeed means more than just churning out scripts. God love the writer who writes the script that sells without having to do much self-promotion, but that is the extreme exception. It takes a lot of other writing (on blogs such as this) to make the "screen" writing pay off. And the internet is undeniably the medium to be embraced to help any writer win success.

But what of my morning paper?

In a similar vein, students who embrace technology so wholeheartedly that it crowds out the joy of hitting the stacks in the library or cracking the spine of a good book...worry me. These students worry me because part of what makes a good writer - be it journalist, or blogger, or screenwriter - is that they are diligent and voracious readers and researchers, are familiar with the canon of western literature, and can string a sentence together on the page. And there's a feel to the page that the internet can never replicate.

-Joe