During his recent visit to Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, Roger Hodge, the former editor of Harper’s, delivered a talk on the paperless future of long-form journalism, which can be viewed here. Given our interest and investment in the prospects for writing and reading online, and our efforts to adapt the magazine format for the Web, we thought it worth our attention. Hodge’s speech, “Decline and Fall,” begins with a caveat: “It’s a requirement of anyone who’s in the magazine industry, especially as an editor, that you be upbeat about the prospects of magazines.” Since his unceremonious dismissal from Harper’s in January, that proviso no longer applies to Hodge, and so he proceeds to run through the numbers: Harper’s circulation is down 7.2%; the sector as a whole is down 35%; TV Guide was sold in 2008…for $1. His verdict: “It is baaad out there.”
Saying as much no longer makes one an apostate, of course. But Hodge—a confessed Luddite who was nonetheless instrumental in building the Harper’s website—goes on to do more than rehearse the most current, daunting conventional wisdom. He offers an eloquent, bleak, elegiac, funny, contrarian take on the forces that have led to the magazine-publishing industry’s collapse, and the concomitant diminution (in funding, in cultural weight) of long-form narrative journalism. Hodge defends the value of independent journalistic institutions, which act as buffers against powerful corporate and governmental interests—in ways that an individual reporter’s brand of one cannot. And yet responsibility for their loss cannot be assigned to technological determinists alone. “We’ve chosen to follow an economic, and social, and political path of least resistance that destroys our traditions and our modes of life and our canons of thought,” Hodge says. “If we continue down this path, we will find ourselves stranded on a Cartesian grid with no landmarks, and with no consolation.”
And what about those who would just as soon see that grid cast aside? They’re as willfully detached from political realities as their even more radical brethren, those “techno-utopians [who] prophecy the coming of the singularity,” and believe in some ill-defined future in which they will “leave our fallen meat space forever as they upload their minds into this glorious neural net in the sky—or something like that.”