People who, like me, have had ink in their blood since they were born and have grown up reading, writing and loving newspapers, know only too well that the print media has been on a nosedive for the past two decades and there can hardly be a seriously credible future for it. It is a sad and sobering thought, alas. The onslaught from the new electronic media has already caused enough damage to the traditional newspaper industry and is wont to go on inflicting more as "newspaper generations" continue to fall by the wayside.
I realise this every time I go to buy my dailies and their Sunday sisters when I am always arguably the youngest one doing so at our loveable newsagent's! It is not a reality particular to Malta, of course. Old media products, such as hard-copy newspapers and magazines, have lost profitability. They had previously been protected from competition by the high costs and economies of scale associated with the supply of information, in most Western nations a near-monopoly right held by a handful of wealthy families or institutions. As A.J. Liebling, the American essayist wrote more than 50 years ago, "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one".
The Internet and social media have opened up new access to information and images, thus helping to establish low-cost networks for the mass circulation of info material. Weighed down by tradition and inflexibility, the old media have had no effective response to open-access competition. Most, as the case with Maltese newspapers, have moved online themselves, some with pay-per-view arrangements that have not exactly been impressively successful due to the availability of free information elsewhere on the net.
As we start the 15th year into the new millennium, I am sure I am not revealing any secrets by saying that in terms of circulation and advertising revenues, the Maltese newspaper industry has seriously shrunk during the past decade. 2015 can hardly augur anything better.
World-wide, slides of 10-to-20 per cent year-on-year are being recorded in the newspaper industry. It is not a happy statistic and sometimes even contested, but it is more or less reflected in the minuscule newspaper world of Malta. There is a societal shift taking place. It shows a definite change in the way people do things; a global evolution brought about by technology and today it is plain to see that these trends will continue.
Even worse for us is the fact that most of our news are generated by political events, political aspirations and political conveniences, all of which are, not so slyly, camouflaged by auto labels and confounding declarations of independence. Give me, any day, the journalist who has no qualms about expressing his ideological beliefs while still retaining his professional integrity. When I read him or her I know where I stand and it is easier to gauge what filters one needs to use. The fake ones cause more confusion and are more irritating.
Where politics are concerned, infotainment - even here - has been fast replacing the very fibre of professional journalism, be it in print or the electronic media. So we are getting a relentless focus on celebrity sludge and a steep rise in "gotcha journalism" with cheap headlines exposing trivial mistakes and inconsistent statements.
Here and everywhere, there is a growing trend for the artificial creation of news achieved through the publication of opinion polls, the reporting of unsubstantiated allegations and the running of denial-type stories whereby politicians (and/or their closest aides) who refuse to rule out a particular policy option are portrayed as likely to implement that policy! Serious current affairs reporting is disappearing, replaced by human interest stories that, yes, have an important place in the process of providing information, but when these stories are inserted for political gain, they are, in truth, simply trash.
It is a sad but inevitable reality many of us who still love newspapers, real ink-blotched newspapers, ponder upon as we go out, like zombies, to buy them everyday.
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Breakthroughs and Breakdowns
According to recent reports, Cambridge University scientists have created artificial human eggs and sperm for the first time, using human embryonic stem cells and skin cells. While this process was previously achieved in rats, this is the first time it has been done with humans.
It is, no doubt, a breakthrough that will gradually cause a few breakdowns in the ethical field. There will always be those who think such "tinkering" with the hidden and wondrous secrets of the human body should not be allowed. However, scientific research to find better ways to treat illnesses and disease, physical handicaps and such perrennial problems as infertility, is certainly one effective and positive way of looking at it. As one of the scientists in this breakthrough, Azim Surani, professor of physiology and reproduction at Cambridge University, said: "germ cells are 'immortal' in the sense that they provide an enduring link between all generations, carrying genetic information from one generation to the next" and as a result, many believe, providing better solutions and instilling more hope in the future.
It has been emphasised that this doesn't mean that men and women can donate any cells instead of sperm and eggs when they visit a fertility clinic - but the scientists hope the experiment will shed more light on the study of human genetics.
The research, however, also gives scientists another way to examine how the environment impacts genes, such as how behavioural factors - like smoking and what we eat - can activate or deactivate genes.
Anyone who thinks, from whichever moral ground, such research should be curtailed is a nutter.
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Islanders always on the receiving end
It seems that islanders everywhere are always on the receiving end. Our own history books can vouch for that. Many have had to face an even worse fate, like the former inhabitants of the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean who were kicked out of their homes in the 1960s by the British government to make way for what is today the suspicious US military base of Diego Garcia.
There were also the inhabitants of Bikini Atoll, a part of the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean where between 1946 and 1958, no less than 23 nuclear devices were detonated by the United States at seven sites located on the reef, inside the atoll, in the air and underwater.
These small communities of islanders, like many others all over the world, were promised they could return to where they belong but they now fear they may never return home, despite politicians' promises over these many decades.
All former imperial powers, from the Americans and the British to the French, the Germans and the Dutch, have played the same game. We hardly ever hear a whimper about it. Islanders, it seems, will always be on the receiving end of history. Perhaps we should be thankful we've always been so over-populated?