About what inspires 'Panorama' — and what should inspire it
Good words from Nathan Heller at Slate about the old-school leanings of Dave Eggers' newspaper and what the real challenge should be:
The quirky efflorescence of that era seems to inspire the Panorama, which contains subsections like "Arts One": a thin and retro-styled insert profiling things like local radio and San Francisco murals. But there's something naggingly backward about the path of its idealism. If the innovations of the '60s and '70s showed anything, it was that journalism thrives by reimagining itself to fit new media and new constraints. A lot of writers these days think of Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) as an artifact of long-form California journalism from a greener era. Fewer realize that most of those pieces were composed for crumbling magazines that bit the dust within months of its publication.
"The old capital has always/ Just been sacked," as poet (and Panorama quatrain contributor) Robert Hass once wrote. The true newspaper of the 21st century will innovate on the canvas as it's given–whatever that may be–rather than trying to pump some life into a form that's run its course. Inventive, beautiful experiments are being done with online journalism at the moment, but you'd never know it from McSweeney's curiously bare-bones Web site. Eggers, in fact, purports to have no Internet connection at his house. Well, here's a challenge: Get wired up. Let McSweeney's turn its creativity on the large, uncharted landscape that lies ahead of newspapers, not the one they've left behind. That's where imagination and passion is most needed these days–and, more to the point: Why not.
