• by Jack Feuer , April 9, 2008

With all the hair-pulling and chest-thumping about digital communications apocalypses -- which I egg on whenever possible -- it's nice to hear somebody complain about old media, like it still mattered. It doesn't, of course, but it's the thought that counts.

Here in El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles de Porciúncula, we have a boulevard named after a billboard mogul and publisher named Henry Gaylord Wilshire. He didn't cotton much to the city's first attempt to regulate the al fresco medium in 1899, which is a little bipolar, since Gaylord was also a raging socialist. Over 100 years later, outdoor is apparently still an issue.

One of our more irritating local columnists, the Los Angeles Times' Patt Morrison (the one with the stupid hats), wrote a piece last week blasting the billboard peddlers for blocking the city's attempt to count how many boards there are in Los Angeles. It seems the locations of Clear Channel and CBS boards are national secrets. Yesterday morning, as I stumbled around the flat looking for clean underwear and a shirt loose enough to hide a belly big enough to be called a small hill, KTLA (one of our more empty-headed local morning "news" shows) picked up the story: Billboard blight is back!

It's funny, or maybe just sadly ironic, that it's a newspaper columnist who got so worked up over one of the oldest anti-marketing tropes around. Newspapers are certain to disprove the industry axiom that old media never die, it's just repurposed. Two decades from now, trees will be free to die from climate change instead of Tribune Company loggers. Newspapers and magazines will have devolved into collectables traded by graying intellectuals and other pseudo-people without a life, like LPs are now. The outlets will still exist, but only virtually, in computers and handheld devices.

Billboards, however, appear to be forever. Media buyers maintain a weird love affair with the things that are the very definition of an analog-world, passive medium. In fact, the very few digital boards there are in the U.S. -- an estimated 700 out of a total of about 450,000 -- aren't allowed to move, beep or bling, only offer real-time information and quick message changes, according to the Outdoor Advertising Association of America and its unfortunately named microsite, digitalooh.org.

Good thing, too, because we have enough to worry about on L.A. roads, what with the shootings and the potholes and the freeways that go in all directions at once. And the bumper-to-bumper traffic that moves at 70 miles an hour, not to mention the less-than-comprehensive driver's ed our friends and neighbors from foreign lands have all apparently received.

So while digital destruction rains down on every other medium, outdoor rocks on. The day after the world ends, the only things left will be cockroaches, Patt Morrison's hats and a digital billboard hanging by one rusty bolt over the 405, switching back and forth from a Sit-N-Sleep mattress message to a Carl's Jr. Western Burger ad, as a lonely wind whistles down the empty freeway below.