Yesterday’s Papers

When the News of the World newspaper shut down recently it led me to wonder if it was not another fatal blow to the print media. What led the journalists to such extremes of method in their news gathering? Certainly one of the main motives was greed as it is in nearly all scandals of this sort, but in order to push the editorial staff of such a large and successful newspaper into taking such risks there must have been some other sort of pressure on them to perform.

In the world of newspapers the most valuable scrap of news is the scoop, the exclusive report that has been found by some intrepid newshound after the slog of exhaustive research and investigations, or so we have been led to believe. The truth though is somewhat different. The majority of what is printed in the daily newspapers comes straight from the news agencies and so it is from the internet. By the time that we are reading the news that is printed in the morning papers it is already old news online. In fact the breaking news aspect to most main stream media has diminished greatly as in every major world news event all of the most up to date information was on the web first.

Anyone who is interested in really finding out about some current event isn’t going to run up to the corner shop for a copy of The Age, they’re almost certainly going to google it. Daily television news programs are hardly the place to go in depth into the real stories of the day, no one wants to confront the truth as they eat their corn flakes in the morning, so they re-hash the top few stories and focus more and more on advertising and human interest/feel good stories. The evening news bulletin is little more than a roundup of the day’s top events that have come off of the APP or Reuters sites with a schmaltzy dose of local/human interest thrown in to go with your sausages and mash at night.

The truth of the decline of the print media can be seen in the continuing slide of the circulation numbers for all of the major daily papers in Australia. Since 1991 the per capita consumption of newspapers has fallen from just under 16% to just fewer than 11%, a loss of one third of its reading audience. People just aren’t buying newspapers like they used to. Can the print media in general survive a blow to its credibility like the one delivered by the News of the World collapse. Are the days of the newspaper scoop history, gone the way of the telegraph, the town crier and the lamp lighter?

Is other print media due to suffer a similar fate, slowly dying of anemic circulation figures until they drop off into history with parchment scrolls and clay tablets? Just as the introduction of inexpensive printing methods brought about an expansion of the press media the immediacy of the internet has caused a boom in news and current affairs sites on the web but how will we sift through the nonsense and fake reports without newspapers and magazines that do this now and in a world driven by the need to be first at all costs can we really trust the media’s version of events in any case?

About dgmattichakjr

D G Mattichak jr was born in 1963 in Syracuse New York and immigrated to Melbourne Australia with his family in 1972. He was educated in one of Melbourne’s exclusive private schools before studying art at Preston Technical College. D G Mattichak jr has been a student of the occult arts since the early 1980s and has become well known in Australian magickal circles and, in recent years, around the world due to a string of essays on a variety of occult subjects http://www.scribd.com/dmattichak/shelf . He discovered the “key to the order & value of the English alphabet” from Aleister Crowley’s Book of the Law in 1983 and has since used this English Qabalah to unlock the secrets of Thelemite magick. Success in these methods admitted him to the highest levels of attainment in various Hermetic disciplines and until recently he has been passing on his knowledge to private students, many of whom have gone on to become notable occultists in their own right. After almost three decades of study and development D G Mattichak jr has finally been able to distil his knowledge of magick and Thelema into a book- A Comment on the Verses of the Book of the Law, the first in a planned series of books on Hermeticism and Thelemite magick, revealing, for the first time in over a century, the secrets of magick that have been hidden in Crowley’s magnum opus, the Book of the Law. D G Mattichak jr currently lives in Melbourne Australia with his artist wife Michelle and their two cats. He has had a long career as an al a carte chef in Melbourne’s vibrant hospitality scene and now spends his time writing blogs on cooking, writing and, in the guise of Master Ankh af na Khonsu, about magick. He is also one of the founding members of the Mt Franklin Annual Pagan Gathering and regularly contributes to its official website http://mountfranklinannualpagangathering.blogspot.com/ as both an administrator and as an author. D G Mattichak jr’s first book Loot was released in 2009. His books are available through amazon.com at http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias=stripbooks&field-keywords=D G Mattichak&x=13&y=20 .

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2 Responses to Yesterday’s Papers

Ed Hurst says:

July 29, 2011 at 9:53 am

Intelligent newspapers would realize their only chance at survival is to offer more local analysis, since that seldom appears on the Net. Of course, that assumes they are rational, too.

dgmattichakjr says:

July 29, 2011 at 11:30 am

Exactly Ed. The Australian papers are so uniformly run by the Murdoch’s of the world that they are effectively gagged anyway. I think that they will eventually disappear.