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

The future of journalism is up for grabs

Fantastic item by a gent named Clay Shirky on the demise of the newspaper. If I can boil it down, the point it this: Publishers have known for a long time that what's happening now was a freight train bearing down on them. They tried any number of things to maintain their industrial-era newspaper structures in the digital age. Nothing worked, and those structures are now collapsing before us.

What replaces them? Nobody knows. The Internet is still in its relative infancy. It's critical that journalism -- not necessarily newspapers, as Mr. Shirky makes the distinction -- survive, and he believes it will, but contends no one can know what that survival will look like.

This has been part of my own thought process. I no longer have any confidence that journalism, at least in the near term, is a viable business where one can make a confident living. And, ultimately, in the midst of all the platitudes about a free society's need for good journalism, for me the most compelling thing of all is that I am not blessed with family wealth, so I have to have an income-generating skill to survive. Right now journalism isn't it. And no one knows when journalism will again become a way to make a confident living. And if it takes 10 years, well, I don't have 10 years. The only option is to find a new career. Not exactly what I had hoped for as a 40th birthday present, but it is what it is.

http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/

-- MJM