More on the future of journalism

Matt's last post is a great read.

It has not been a good past few years in the print journalism. But it's really ramped up the past few weeks.

The lynchpin was the demise of the Rocky Mountain News at the end of February. This was the proverbial canary in the coal mine. I have a friend and former co-worker who was in that newsroom, which was told on Thursday that they were putting out the paper's final edition that night. That was it - a business that was two months shy of its 150th anniversary went "poof!"

I think one of the problems we've run into in newspapers the past few years was a simple attitude of how there would always be a place for print, even in a crowded media landscape. (I plead guilty to this as well.) After all, people have been writing the, ahem, obituary of newspapers since radio was invented.

Thing was, those changes with broadcast media happened gradually and there was a clear delineation between the styles of broadcast journalism and print journalism. So even when TV came out, people knew they had to go to newspapers for the stories that couldn't be covered in a half-hour or even an hour of nightly news.

Now, print has been challenged by something that has blossomed nearly overnight in the scheme of things and has nearly unlimited content. And newspapers' space is ever-shrinking.

It doesn't matter how all this happened. Quite frankly, I'm sick and tired of the hand-wringing and analysis of why this has happened, which is why I've kept my venting as brief as possible. I want to know what we can do. And when it will happen.

-JDE2