Homepage

Column: Time for a digestif!

According to Schopenhauer, newspapers are the "second hand of history". Those days are gone. The second hand has now switched to the radio and the Internet. But the newspaper lives on, and has even been given a new lease of life - just think of the NZZ and the Tagesanzeiger. However, it must focus on its strengths if it is to have a bright future ahead of it.

What can a newspaper do that other media either can't do or can't do as well? Classify. If every piece of information is available to everyone all the time, there is a greater need for guidance and overview. For an authority to select and look through, someone smart and sharp-tongued who can phrase things in an enlightening way. However exciting it may be to surf the Internet and zap your way through the various specialist channels - eventually people yearn for thought-provoking communication with sharp, pioneering thinkers. Being your own programme director gets tedious after a while. Only ever wanting to know what you want to know at that very moment. It reminds me of this question from the anti-authoritarian kindergartens of the 1970s: "Ms Huber, do we really have to play what we want to play again today?"

This is where the newspaper comes in. Here I can find out about things I never even knew I was interested in. The Internet provides information on demand, as required. The newspaper has to consciously expand my horizons, stir my interests, make me eager to find out more. It can only do that if it is itself bursting with curiosity.

Electronic media are an excellent appetizer, while the Internet is a menu with something for every taste. The newspaper should be seen as a digestif - to help digest all that undigested information we've consumed too quickly. To do this, it needs to be selective: to differentiate, classify, put into perspective, ironise. Why should I read a newspaper if all it contains is what I heard on the radio, saw on the TV and viewed on every news portal yesterday?

The newspaper has survived to stir up the fragments of information, as an intelligent catalyst against apathy and lack of opinion. It has to move away from the mind-numbing consensus culture - and towards a desire for dissent, to incite fervent debates. It needs commentaries that surprise, editorials that perplex and columns that contain unusual perspectives: razor-sharp, provocative, intelligent and polemic. The newspaper as purgatory for intellectual lethargy: independent, committed, unashamed.

Would a newspaper like this still go to print? That's the publishers' worry. Because you see, publishers are just printers at heart. But it doesn't matter in what format I receive the newspaper, whether on paper or electronically. What matters is that it contains trailblazing ideas.

Ludwig Hasler