Celebrating what would have been the 100th birthday of Marshall McLuhan this week, we present “I Think Mr. McLuhan Is Trying to Tell Us Something,” from Nieman Reports, June 1969.
In a memo to his publishers, Miami News editor Sylvan Meyer speculates on how they could use the ideas of Marshall McLuhan to improve the paper. He endorses McLuhan’s thoughts about considering advertisements as part of the paper’s content, writing of the want ads in particular that, “if we couldn’t sell them I would advocate giving them away because of the readership and rapport they promote.”
But he also rejects some of McLuhan’s larger notions about how readers have grown accustomed to moving images on TV, offering a few tongue-in-cheek descriptions of a “McLuhanized” paper:
“We could use purple and green ink, change fonts for every word of a headline, print alternate lines in different colors, superimpose type across pictures, paste little flipbooks to our pages so people could thumb them rapidly and have animation, as in a Beatle movie.”
…
“We could circle vital notices with red and blue arrows and write “Hey, Look!” over them in purple letters, each of a different size.”
His memo ends with a promise to try to meet with McLuhan to discuss his ideas, hoping to figure out: “Once I program the environment, what do you reckon he thinks I ought to do next?”
