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The Days the Earth Stood Still

oldehamme

Updated: Jul 16, 2024


A meteor shaped like a coronavirus striking the earth

Originally published within "Under the Covers," from Signature Magazine, 4/13/20


At least we didn’t call it “Evolve or Die.”


In the wild, that’s the choice that plays out at the species level in the face of an altered environment. The species adapts to the new circumstances or it doesn’t. Either way, extinction is a likely outcome, as the species becomes something wholly new or it just ends.


Fortunately, in publishing, we can adapt at the individual level. Our industry is nothing if not a history of technological changes that wrought havoc with the status quo. How many times have you read (or written) an article about the imminent death of print? First, it was radio. Then movies. Then television. Then the Internet. Each one was supposed to be the asteroid that snuffed out printed communications in one devastating explosion. And yet, like some miniscule shrew that subsists on crumbs, while giant dinosaurs starve in that same blasted landscape, print endures. It just doesn’t always look the same.


In trying to find a visual metaphor for that kind of epigenetic change, I was reminded of a favorite analogy made, if memory serves, by author and paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. Arguing that evolution is not, in fact, progressive—a point on which reasonable scientists disagree—Gould posited that truly progressive evolution would confer every conceivable advantage to a given species, making outright extinction functionally unnecessary. His example, illustrating the limits that biology places on such physical adaptations, involved butterflies with machine guns.


I’m grossly simplifying the argument in order to cut to the chase: what if butterflies did have machine guns? Or gazelles had wheels? Or giraffe necks operated like scissor lifts? The animal/machine hybrid adaptations were endless. And it seemed to me an apt illustration of an individual adapting to escape a challenging scenario, the crux of this month’s cover story.

As always, this was a collaboration among Signature’s Publisher/Editorial Director Carla Kalogeridis, Associate Editor Thomas Marcetti, (who once again penned our cover story), and me. We batted around many other solutions, including the two unused layouts seen above. But I, for one, was pretty sure we had a winner with this “Evolve or Else” concept.


And then COVID-19 happened.


As of this writing, more than 31 media companies have laid off or furloughed employees, cut salaries for others, or reduced or even halted their publication frequencies. Some 28,000 media employees have been affected so far, with numbers sure to increase long before this crisis begins to recede. Even as public hunger for new information is at an all-time high, the evaporation of advertising revenue has made it nearly impossible to gather news and also turn a profit.


How on earth do we evolve our way out of this mess?


With respect to this cover, I couldn’t have expected the phrase “Or Else” would become so charged, so soon. Speaking strictly for myself, while I acknowledge that it’s a harsh term, I think its use here is justified by a completely shared sense of urgency. Right at this moment, I still have a job and an industry that needs my services. Will I be able to say that in three months? Six months? Will any of us?


Compared to the immediate strains faced by industries such as healthcare, transportation, food service and retail, our challenges in publishing seem minor. But the asteroid has struck. And while flattening the curve of COVID-19 is a shared effort, its legacy will almost certainly play out in countless every-man-for-himself scenarios. For anyone who considered adaptation to be a professional choice, Nature has just reminded us otherwise.



Cover of the April/May 2020 issue of Signature Magazine

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