Part 5: All the News

McSweeney's #33, The San Francisco Panorama

Now we come to the end, and, in the end, what we buy newspapers for is the news. Other print matter we buy for other reasons, things such as novels, literary magazines, comic books & so forth. Newspapers are for the news, and so it is good to see that there is a lot of it in The Panorama. Though, as this is an experimental newspaper, the news is much different than you would find in your typical daily edition—and I’ll get into how it is different in a second. Also, it is much more varied than can be fully expressed here, in writing style and subject matter. Why is it so varied? I suppose because the newspaper is an experiment; they experimenting. Also, different reading audiences want different things. And McSweeney’s is trying to give an example of a type of paper that can attract more readers than the typical ones do. All newspapers seem to attempt variance of one level or another. The Panorama is perhaps just a high degree of it. But I digress.

I mentioned in the first post of this series just how big The Panorama is—but what I’ve come to understand over this past week of reading through it is that it is not just big in heft or paper weight, but in subject and style as well, like a Duras novel perhaps, or a Broken Social Scene song. I had originally assumed that a week would be plenty of time to devote my mornings to reading The Panorama and then do a few brief write-ups about the experience. A Sundy morning stretching into afternoon was always plenty of time to devote to an issue of the Sunday NYTimes or Sunday Oregonian. Yet I came to realize late Wednesday that a week of mornings was not nearly enough time to make it through the articles, charts, graphs, interview, stories, comics, cut-outs, pamphlets, poetry, and posters littered throughout The Panorama.

For one, the articles are long, much longer than your usual newspaper piece. They are more along the lines of those long Vanity Fair exposes (the ones that go on for pages in the rear of the magazine) or those articles that comes out every once in a while from The Times that extend into a couple of back pages in the front section of the paper. The Panorama editors gave their writers plenty of room to write about the complex, grey worlds their subjects exist within—whether it be the world of marijuana capitalism in Mendocino County (great article) or a travelogue about walking the 500-mile Camino de Santiago (at 24 pages, nearly as exhaustive a read as the walk itself). This great amount of lengthy articles isn’t something a daily newspaper could do. The obvious reason The Times doesn’t run such pieces all the time is that they take weeks or months to research, write, and edit. Someone has to still write the day to day stuff. The news of the moment. Daily newspaper writers often have just days, or even hours, to write copy. They don’t get the months that went into The Panorama’s pieces. (And who knows, maybe it will be the weekly rather than the daily newspaper that thrives in the future.)

More than length, the articles in The Panorama can’t (or perhaps shouldn’t) be read at top speed. These aren’t the fourth-grade-reading-level news articles we are used to in lots of newspapers. Instead, the articles in The Panorama are (1) very well written and thought out and (2) well worth the time it takes to read them. According to Eggers, “For investing an hour into a story, paper is still the best literary device.” And I don’t believe I am alone in thinking he is right. I spent a good amount of time reading Eggers’s own favorite article in the issue: the wonderful, ten page long “Gentlemen, Start Your Engines” by Andrew Sean Greer. Now, Greer’s essay is less hard news than travel journalism, it’s more literary than journalistic, but it is in the end an engrossing and personal look at one of our American obsessions: the car. And I learned while I read it. And isn’t that what news is for? For me, all of the personal notations/observations by Greer added to the “news” the piece was reporting on. My father taught high school automotive for over two decades, and, like Greer’s husband in the article, my father too would quiz us about the makes of cars as they whizzed by on the interstate. From Greer’s piece:

Say, America, that you drink ten Bud Light Limes in a row, on top of two Cherry Bombs and a sip of something pink and curdled involving Malibu Coconut Rum, and decide to go in search of NASCAR debauchery. Perhaps, to get into the spirit of things, you bum a menthol Newport and smoke it until green sparkles appear in the corners of your eyes. Say half a dozen of you, similar substances coursing through your veins, head out from Northwoods through a gap in the chain-link fence while the security guard isn’t looking. What would you see?

RVs and pop-ups decorate the dark, rolling landscape, packed together like Chiclets, each strung with Christmas or rope lights or, more elaborately, light-up Budweiser signs and disco balls. Couples, families, or groups of guys are huddled around fires, each encircled (for safety’s sake) by rings of dead beer cans piled up in careful structures some three or four cans high. No solo women campers, or groups of women. There are cardboard cut-outs of women, naturally, holding beer signs, loaded with Mardi Gras beads, beside large hand-lettered signs reading BEADS FOR BOOBIES! Some camps are set up as tiki huts, some with simple plywood bars, but most are fold-up chairs around a fire, a cooler for the beer. There are over nine thousand campsites, around fifty thousand campers, and during racing events the city of Brooklyn, which contains this state park, becomes the third-largest city in Michigan…

The Panorama is, in the end, a carnival, a circus, and much more like the Internet than its creators may have anticipated. Like the Internet, The Panorama is a variety of sizes, shapes, colors, subjects, and texts. One thing it does is show just how much the Internet and the film medium have changed the way we read. But I still loved it. But then, I am writing this on a website. Again, The Panorama is an experiment. It is like the futuritic cars at the annual auto shows. And you have to admit that some of them are awesome.

NOTES:

Maybe it is just because I am writing this for a website about writing and publishing, but, like Roxane Gay, my favorite part of The Panorama was probably the Information Pamphlet, which breaks down and explains the production and costs of The Panorama. Again and again Eggers and Co. explain that The Panorama isn’t a newspaper product, but an experiment in newspaper publishing. The paper makes up the results of the experiment. The pamphlet is the lab report.

Steve Rhodes's photo of the SF Sound poster from The Panorama

I was wrong in my first post when I guessed about who designed The Panorama title/logo: it was not Chris Ware, but Daniel Clowes (of Ghost World fame).

The SF Sound poster (pictured at left) is completely awesome. It is a graphic layout of the past 50 years of SF music. My wife and I spent fifteen minutes staring at it laid out over the dining room table this afternoon at lunch. I was ridden with anxiety the entire time that a fleck of our spaghetti would fall on it.

Steve Rhodes has put up a wonderful Flickr stream with pictures of many pages of The Panorama. (Such as the SF Sound one above.)

I didn’t make it through all of the news, though I read most of it and at least skimmed the rest. Okay, I admit: I hardly even cracked the food section. But I am totally putting the SF Sound poster up in my basement. And I’ll never get rid of the comics.

Read part 1 here, part 2 here, part 3 here, and part 4 here.