Today’s SF Chronicle carries a front-page article on the San Francisco Panorama, the ambitious forthcoming publication from SF publishing house McSweeney’s. Blatantly self-serving motives aside (the piece offers Chron readers “the chance to preorder the one-time product” through its sfgate.com website and announces plans to run excerpts from the Panorama in the coming weeks), Julian Guthrie’s overview neatly profiles a literary endeavor that is anything but concise: The Panorama clocks in at 320 pages. The pub’s centerpiece comes in the form of a 112-page broadsheet newspaper comprising investigative and feature news writing as well as substantial arts, sports, food and comics sections. A 112-page magazine and a 96-page books section round out the epic.
As one would expect of an endeavor of such staggering length, McSweeney’s employed an army of creative types for the project — 150 of them, to be inexact. As the broadsheet’s name implies, the Panorama is heavy on the Bay Area/NorCal slant, and the contributors’ page is accordingly representative (Michael Chabon, Robert Hass, Peter Orner, Sean Wilsey and other notable locals, as well as “dozens of working and laid-off Bay Area journalists,” provided words). But the scope of Panorama’s literary and artistic haul is equally impressive from a national perspective: Stephen King, Chris Ware, Junot Díaz, George Saunders, Art Spiegelman and Matt Klam lend their names to the project. So breathtaking is the collection, in fact, that the Chronicle deems it deserving of a quote from one of its own editors, Ward Bushee, who asserts that “the Panorama may be the biggest, most creative and famously bylined edition of a newspaper ever printed.”
Justifiably gushing praise for the literary collaborgy aside, let’s get real: Dave Eggers’ latest altruistic project, slated for release on Dec. 8th, looks to be brilliant in many, many ways, but it will not save newspaper. The Panorama is a one-off several months in the making. It costs $16 (though Bay Area readers can cop it for just $5 the day it debuts). And the prospect of the publication realizing a profit appears dubious at best.
Wisely, McSweeney’s stops short of issuing any delusionally grandiose proclamations, instead implying that the Panorama is intended to display to the public and What Remains of Newspaper that there are alternatives to reining it in. Explains the publisher: “We think that the best chance for newspapers’ survival is to do what the internet can’t: namely, use and explore the large-paper format as thoroughly as possible. To that end, we opted for a huge and luxurious broadsheet — 15” x 22”. Then we unleashed artists and designers to show exactly how much the format can do.”
The newspaper section of the Panorama, then, should serve as an experimental blueprint — an idea, or rather, a collection of ideas, for purveyors and readers of newspaper to examine and consider. Many, if not most, major newspaper publishers and owners will dismiss the Panorama as a fantastic and fiscally nonviable exercise in “alternative” journalism. These are people whose ideas — or, more accurately, lack of such — haven’t served their publications particularly well in recent times.
Newspaper needs an overhaul if it is to survive in any physical form; the time for tender tweaks to the business model has passed. In an industry whose only recent innovative success is championed chiefly by a fossil intent on reeling back civil rights to 1952, the Panorama may serve as the radical catalyst newspaper needs to avoid a meek descent into utter irrelevance.
