Print media does much of society’s heavy journalistic lifting, from flooding the zone — covering every angle of a huge story — to the daily grind of attending the City Council meeting, just in case. This coverage creates benefits even for people who aren’t newspaper readers, because the work of print journalists is used by everyone from politicians to district attorneys to talk radio hosts to bloggers. The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?

be nice to see newspapers go back to imagining themselves as a public trust and a source of civic pride with local ownership rather than a publicly traded chip in some vast media empire.
- dave 3-20-2009 11:17 pm

Steven Berlin Johnson on the future of newspapers. (via dave.)
- jim 3-20-2009 11:23 pm

jay rosen round-up
- dave 3-27-2009 7:01 pm