Pressing On

At times, covering the media beat in 2009 felt like watching an endless serial of The Perils of Pauline. Each week, it seemed, traditional media was tied to a railroad track to be run over by an oncoming train (let's call it the Google Express), nearly burned at the stake (once profitable newspapers and magazines going up in smoke like kindling), or almost cut in half by a buzz saw (AOL Time Warner comes to mind). Sometimes there were last-minute rescues in the form of nonprofit news site or (many hope) tablet devices and digital newsstand partnerships. More often than not, though, the trains came, the flames burned, and those buzz saws just kept spinning.

In all, 2009 was a difficult, dispiriting, and at times despairing year for anyone who cared about the history—and the future—of journalism and media in general. It wasn't just the loss of tens of thousands of jobs, but also the closing of Gourmet (and others), the shrinking of newspapers to single-section skeletons, and the whittling down of reporting to 140-character tweets. And, of course, through it all, the media covered the story of its own struggles in real time, alternating between woe-is-media garment rending and let's-put-on-a-show chest beating. (Whether you saw these moments as death rattles or growing pains speaks directly toward your particular take on the organizations that brought the world both the Pentagon Papers and Jon and Kate's divorce.)

That's why this is the last post I'll be doing under the Pressed rubric. Reporting, blogging, aggregating, and thinking about the media on a daily basis feels increasingly like a fool's errand. Tracking the narrative—not just of an industry's decline but of all the incremental steps being taken to revive whatever remains salvageable for the platforms and consumer habits of the future—is futile, at least for the time being. In order to get a little perspective—and, to be honest, some rest—I'll be stepping away from the daily media beat, at least for the foreseeable future. This beat goes on—today, the Washington Post's Neely Tucker reported massive layoffs at the Washington Times; Apple is set to make some sort of big announcement in San Francisco on January 26th that might be its long anticipated tablet, according to Fox News.com's Clayton Morris; etc.—but in 2010, it will have to go on without me.

My thanks to the editors and publisher of Portfolio.com for giving me this perch and the freedom to write what I wanted how I wanted. The very existence of this website after the spectacular 2007 rollout and 2009 fold up of Condé Nast Portfolio is proof that sometimes the damsel does get saved before the train runs her over.

But those moments just before she's untied can be pretty distressing. Can you blame a longtime observer for wanting to turn away—at least for a little while?