Remediation and Immediacy in newspapers
John Kay’s blog about “Remediation” by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin
February 2, 2010
Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin helped me to make sense of how new media and old media relate to each other. The appearance of new media does not necessarily spell the end of old media. After photography and the technology to print photographs on newsprint were invented, for example, newspapers did not die because readers could visualize the story; rather, newspaper publishers added the photographs to their articles. Bolter and Grusin would say that the medium of photography was “remediated” in the papers.
The advent of digital photography at the end of the twentieth century allowed newspapers to print photographs and post them on their websites. “We will argue,” write Bolter and Grusin, “that remediation is a defining characteristic of the new digital medium” (p. 45).
In the last twenty years, many newspapers have made the mistake of simply posting their newspaper articles on their websites, as if the online and offline experiences of consuming a newspaper were identical. Fortunately, many newspapers have corrected that original fallacy by writing shorter articles, including many headlines and hyperlinks, and even remediating video by adding it. As a result of such improvements, the online presence of newspapers now offers a “hypermediated” experience, that is, one in which the online reader discovers a fuller experience by consuming audio, video, and hyperlinks to related content.
Printed articles have remediated the radio/television style of writing in which writers write in the present rather than past tense and discuss the latest news. For example, a newspaper reporter once might have written, “A head-on collision on Monday on the corner of Campbell and Floyd Roads sent two motorists to the hospital.” Writing like broadcast reporters, some newspaper reporters now write, “Two motorists are in stable condition in the hospital following a head-on collision on Monday on the corner of Campbell and Floyd Roads.” The newspapers want the readers to think that they are reading the latest news (such as that found in broadcast media and online) rather than yesterday’s news.
Whether printing analog or digital photographs, newspapers rarely achieve immediacy, which is “a process in which the media is ‘erased’ from the experience as much as possible in order to achieve a more ‘real’ experience” (MediatedMemories.com). Magazine photographs have come closer to immediacy because the print quality on slick stock is much clearer than that of photographs on newsprint. Because journalism has sought to publish the truth, readers have believed the photographs to be unaltered. “Because a digital photograph can sometimes be regarded as transparent [especially when printed in a magazine], it too can express our desire for immediacy” (p. 111).
