"O brave new world, that has such people in’t!”
When William Shakespeare put those words in the voice of Miranda, Prospero’s lonely, castaway daughter, “brave new world” was an expression of awe and wonder, if a naive one.
Some 300 years later, when Aldous Huxley borrowed the phrase as the title for an early work of dystopian fiction, it was something much more sinister.
So, which brave new world of mass media are we approaching?
There’s the one more akin to Huxley’s, or perhaps Orwell’s. The one that flows to us via social media, mostly but not only Facebook, carrying the lies of Putin’s propaganda machine. It’s the one that was just enough to get a horrid excuse for a human elected president in the United States and to pass an evil referendum in the United Kingdom.
And there is the one that might, just might, be the result of Monday’s announcement that The Salt Lake Tribune has been granted nonprofit status so that it may survive into the future, serving this community and this state, shedding the weight of old business models while carrying the best of what’s become known as the legacy media forward.
“Legacy” is a polite word for “old.” Like other legacy industries — airlines, taxis, recorded music, coal — we haven’t always been able to negotiate the new world created in Silicon Valley and living in your pocket.
Oh, we saw it coming. We’ve talked for years about how we want to be dinosaurs that evolve into birds. We say we’re not in the newspaper business, but the news business. Or the information business. Or the understanding business.
Whatever it was, it wasn’t making any money.
The killer blow was the loss of classified advertising — everything from new cars to lost cats — that paid the freight for 100 years. And if it was just a matter of whether you posted your apartment for rent or free dirt ad in print or online, it would have been of less consequence to society than the loss of Tower Records to Spotify.
But the press didn’t exist — and certainly wasn’t in the First Amendment — to sell used furniture or help SWM find SWF. We’re here to tell you about your community, your nation and your world. Who’s running it, who wants to run it, what they want to do with it if you let them and what they really did with it while you weren’t looking.
As so much of the world’s attention shifted online — ads first, then information — the real danger to civilization kind of crept up on us.
It wasn’t that people who work for newspapers deserve to keep their jobs any more than blacksmiths or Pullman porters did. It was that without the principles of legacy journalism governing the flow of information, too many social media feeds were glutted with lies.
Now The Tribune is a nonprofit, tax-exempt community charity, in the hands of a knowledgeable and generous community. So there is reason to hope that you will be less at the mercy of purveyors of propaganda who may be evil or may be just playing with us.
Besides, Paul Huntsman, who saved The Tribune from ruin a few years ago, and who built this new vision, has other things to do and other visions to fund.
Monday, just before he dropped by our office to celebrate our new status, he joined other members of his amazingly philanthropic family to announce a $150 million gift to the University of Utah to create the Huntsman Mental Health Institute, maybe the biggest single attempt ever to address mental illness in Utah and elsewhere.
While y’all write your own jokes about the intersection of mental illness and journalism, we will be working out the details of how this brave new world might save independent journalism, not just as a business, but as a bulwark against the irresponsible use of mass media that endangers democracy itself.
George Pyle, reading The New York Times at The Rose Establishment.
George Pyle, old editorial page editor of the new Salt Lake Tribune, has not read “Brave New World.” But he has read “Animal Farm” and has seen “The Tempest” a few times.
