After seeing it used several times by Courant/Fox 61 Publisher/GM Rich Graziano, I am compelled to join those who ask: What does he mean by “platform agnostic?”
An agnostic is someone who believes it is impossible to know whether there is a God. More generally, it is means “doubtful” or “uncommitted.”
I suspect he means “platform neutral,” meaning he is not favoring any single platform over any other… or he means that it is impossible to know whether any news platform is any good… or maybe he means uncommitted to any platform, period. That’s assuming you know what he means by the word “platform,” which I think he is using to mean “medium,” or, in the plural, “media.” (I always thought “platform” referred to a computer operating system, or something a train pulled up to.)
Certainly it is becoming next to impossible to believe that good word-craft and good journalism can survive on any “platform” at The Courant.
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It’s probably inevitable that in these brutal times for news-gathering operations, a new lexicon would take hold to describe the baffling challenges of the industry.
… One phrase we’re hearing a lot lately is “platform agnostic.”
The phrase seems to have been around for some time now actually, to judge from a Nexis search on the string of words. It appears first in the Nexis database in 1991, but in terms of annual use doesn’t break the double digits until 1996, when the phrase appears 29 times. this from http://www.observer.com/2008/media/new-media-religion-platform-agnostic
Then the word seems to have its big break, leaping from 64 uses in 1999 to 158 in 2000. So it’s definitely a phrase of the 21st Century.
What does it mean, though?
There doesn’t seem to be much agreement on the Web. One Web-marketing site has a definition of the term that seems pretty neutral: “Refers to code or an application that is able to run on any platform. A platform is a made up of the operating system, and hardware, such as the motherboard.” Another advises Web entrepreneurs to avoid the term, classing it, alongside phrases like “leading-edge” and “world expert” as a “weasel word,” not to be used when making presentations to investors. …
in other words, an invention by people for whom language is a second language.
The man who coined the term “agnosticism” was a self-taught 19th-century English biologist named Thomas Henry Huxley — an expert on inverterbrates, appropriately enough.
Henry Wace, principal at King’s College and a dean of Canterbury Cathedral, wrote scornfully that Huxley “may prefer to call himself an Agnostic; but his real name is an older one–he is an infidel; that is to say, an unbeliever.”
In the case of the Tribune newspapers, Wace is probably right about agnostics: They’re non-believers — in this case non- believers in print journalism. They would appear to be preparing to move everything online to cut costs. Actually, that’s not quite accurate: They’re not preparing to move everything online. Because they’re essentially agnostics, with little belief in the basic tenets or mission of the press, they’re prepared to remake newspapers online in the image of what they find browsing online: blogs, social-networking sites, celebrity news bites on Twitter, etc.
Huxley was known as “Darwin’s Bulldog,” and “platform evolution” has become another favorite tenet of the “platform agnostics.” “Newspapers need to evolve,” they proclaim, and by this they mean that they need to cease to be newspapers — cease to offer much in the way of news and cease to be printed on paper.
Huxley made his voyage of discovery on the HMS Rattlesnake, funnily enough — not on the HMS Beagle. On the subject of God, he may well have been right — who knows (as one might ask in true agnostic fashion)? But those who have adopted his term for what’s going on with newspapers are on their own pirate ship Rattlesnake. They’re not agnostics, but simply spineless non-believers with little or no respect for print journalism. It’s apparent in their redesigns — or “reinventions” — of the Tribune Co.’s newspapers, and in the changes they foresee in their gobbledygook spiels on the future of newspapers — or non-future of newspapers. At the very least, the future for them is more doubtful than agnostic, and the discussions themselves — led by those on the Rattlesnake in Chicago — may be more prevaricating than doubtful.
One hopes that the time will come when journalists take steps to preserve newspapers as many of them still are now, as an essential part of our communities and nation. They are, in the words of another 19th-century scholar, Thomas Carlyle, the Fourth Estate — which is, Edmund Burke said, referring to the other “estates” (the clergy, the nobles and the commoners) “more important than them all.”
(Alas, my references in support of newspapers would seem to hail from the 19th century.)