This is my last column in Ticket. Before any (delete as appropriate) rending of garments/dancing in streets/blank, indifferent stares, I should note that I’ll be popping up soon in another part of The Irish Times.
As it happens, this year is also the 25th anniversary of what used to be called The Ticket – the definite article was dropped in a 2017 revamp – which I’ve been involved with, on and off, since the very beginning.
The supplement’s peripatetic history – it has appeared variously on Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays – and its various changes of layout and emphasis over the past 25 years mirror the topsy-turvy story of printed media in the 21st century, along with related developments in the way the arts are covered.
The single most important change, which came eight years ago, was the inclusion of the book-reviews section.
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Originally conceived as a listings, film and music mag with the express intention of appealing to “younger people who aren’t picking up a newspaper”, Ticket is now a culture and literary review within a multisupplement weekend edition that, despite the inexorable slide in daily newspaper sales, still commands a large and loyal readership. That looks set to endure for some time.
The technological disruptions of the past quarter-century haven’t just driven transformations in the way media works. The art forms that Ticket covers are now watched and heard in profoundly different ways that alter the audience’s experience and have destroyed traditional business models.
In 2000 home broadband was a rarity, mobile data an unimaginable luxury and DVDs still a cutting-edge technology. In recorded music the CD reigned supreme, and we reviewed more than a dozen of them every week, alongside separate sections for cinema and video releases.
But Napster and other file-sharing platforms were beginning to impinge on the public consciousness, and a year after The Ticket’s launch the first iPod rolled off the Apple production line. All was changing, utterly.
In those early years you could intermittently find articles from the section on ireland.com, the old Irish Times website, but the journalists who wrote them didn’t think that the online versions were being read. They were probably right about that, although there wasn’t any social media to give them feedback anyway.
Now, if you’re reading this on irishtimes.com or the Irish Times app, you’ll see no indication of what part of the newspaper it appeared in. There were theological debates at one point about whether Ticket should have an online presence, but that never made much sense. So it all comes under the Culture section, which was established in 2009, and is produced by a unified editorial team. (There were a lot more editors around in 2000.)
The Irish Times is now a digitally-led media company, clear about the fact that it will only survive by building an audience of subscribers willing to pay to read it online.
That existential challenge, I’m glad to say, is going well. But it’s not just nostalgia that causes me to wonder whether there’s a bit of life left in the print dog yet. Some of the most successful media ventures of the past 25 years have pursued a dual strategy, pairing a high-quality weekly print edition with a seven-day digital offering. That could well be a viable path for this newspaper when it arrives at a point where it is no longer sustainable to publish a newspaper six days a week.
[ As it turns 100, meet the most reliable New Yorker you’ll ever encounterOpens in new window ]
That day won’t be reached for a while yet. But similarly existential questions hang over many assumptions that underpinned cultural production at the time of Ticket’s original launch.
Forms such as the album and the feature film, which appeared immutable then, have been decoupled from the material reality of analogue production. As a result, it seems to me, their importance has waned. Films may not have been replaced by episodic TV, as some predicted a few years ago, but they show little sign of a popular revival.
And music and film alike have experienced a long, slow hollowing out of their respective middle markets, leaving behind a landscape defined by a handful of billionaires and a million artists living in penury.
Meanwhile, despite the Schumpeterian destruction wrought by Google and the smartphone on the old listings-mag model that was at the heart of the original Ticket, live culture continues to flourish, with an efflorescence of festivals, gigs and spoken-word events.
Ireland remains painfully underserved when it comes to small and medium-sized venues and gallery spaces, but there is clearly an enthusiasm for real-life experiences in this virtualised world.
That remains at the heart of what Ticket is about: put down your phone and go out to that show. It’ll be worth it.
