A Sad Morning Chat

A 36-year-old man and his 68-year-old father sit quietly on a bench waiting for the man’s train to take him off to the airport. After six days together, they’ve largely run out of things to talk about. Yet as the man’s mind starts thinking ahead to returning home to work, he’s revisited by the panic and fears that he tried to forget about during his break.

“I may have to find something else to do with my life,” the man said sadly. "This is all I've ever wanted to do, and I may have to find some other way to do it."

“What do you mean?” the father replied.

“My business is dying.”

“It’s that bad? You seem so busy.”

“Well, not my business exactly. My business is down, but my industry. My industry is dying.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“I listen to you talk about the old days when there were all these different newspapers in New York and all that and I wish I was around then. My colleagues that are your age, at least they got a whole career in the way it was. Everybody's terrified. Nobody has any idea what the media will look like in five years. I mean, it must’ve been a pain in the ass to write before computers, but…”

“Computers have killed a lot of jobs,” the retired printing company owner said. “They were supposed to create all these jobs, but now everything’s so efficient, they don't need all these people.”

“It’s true. I was watching some movie the other night on TV and they showed this office in the 1940s and there were these teams of people doing jobs that now take one person a couple of minutes to do.”

“We used to have typesetters, used to bang bang bang,” the father recalled. “That’s all gone now. There's no noise anymore. Just clickety clickety.”

“I know. And now, look around. They shut down the paper in Denver, that Seattle paper is online only now, Detroit is delivering a few days a week now…”

“I know,” the father interrupted. “I read all about it. I see it. So, what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. Nobody knows what to do. A lot of reporters I know became publicists, but even the publicists in Vegas are having a hard time. They’ve got a big event to promote or something, who do they promote it to? The New York Times isn’t taking any freelance in their arts section. The L.A. Times is pretty much bankrupt, people I know can’t get paid. Newsweek isn’t even covering the news anymore. The travel sections around the country are mostly using wire.”

“Time to write the Big Book, huh?”

“Hah, yeah. But then who’s going to read it, how are you going to promote it? That’s the next shoe to fall, the book industry. I’ve never understood how they pay these writers these huge amounts to do their books. They have to sell so many books to make it make any sense and so few of them do. That model’s the next to collapse. It makes no sense.”

Silence.

“Besides, I’ve got lots of ideas,” the man says, “but how do I find the time to do them when I’ve got to work twice as hard to make two-thirds of the money to pay the mortgage on a house that is worth half what we paid for it?”

“You speak to a lot of very powerful people all the time. What does Steve Wynn think is going to happen?”

“Oh, I don’t know, it’s never occurred to me to ask Steve Wynn what he thinks is going to happen to the media.”

“Well, you know what I hate? I hate those ads on the Internet.”

“Somebody’s gotta pay for that stuff somehow, Dad.”

“I know, but you think shoving an ad for a picture of a Honda over my email is going to make me buy a Honda?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can’t you write for some Web sites?”

“I do, but they pay less so I have to do more. People like Arianna Huffington don't pay anything, you're supposed to be satisfied with the exposure. Nobody pays much. You know, because you won’t buy the Honda off that Honda ad and all.”

“If I need to buy a car, I know how to find it.”

“I did get an interesting offer the other day."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah. Someone wants to pay me to Tweet something for them.”

“Tweet?”

“Tweet. Like write messages for them on Twitter.”

Long silence.

“I have a question,” the father finally said.

“Sure, what?”

"I don't want you to think I'm stupid or behind the times or anything."

"I promise, I won't."

"OK," he said. "What’s Twitter?”


Sent from my iPod