Today is not a good day for journalism, but then very few are these days. Today though, the news hits closer to home for me. After a premature report on the TV yesterday that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer was closing, word came out today that Seattle is likely to become a one-paper town because the PI is for sale and if no buyer is found in 60 days it will close or go online only.  This terrible news ties into something I have been thinking about a lot lately. Speaking not just as a journalist but as a citizen of this country and world, I fear that this ongoing stor of dying papers and magazines could doom our democracy.

In the comments section of the PI’s story about its impending doom, there are a number of lamentations about the loss, but there are also a fair amount of hecklers (and not a few trolls) who are more than happy to see the “dinosaur of old media” go extinct. These people live in a world where they get all the news they want, on any subject they want, whenever they want, for free. To them, the idea of paying 50 cents or a buck for a sheaf of dead trees mashed into a pulp and covered with a petroleum product is unseemly and there is no need to suppprt a business by paying for their work if it is online. After all, they reason, what’s the point of getting one’s hands dirty with newsprint (even if it is virtual) when citizen journalists aplenty have blogs and twitter feeds to get the word out and they do it for free? (Not to mention Google and its belief that newspapers could survive, but their unwillingness to actually do anything to help.)

As a blogger and a journalist for an independent media company, I honor, respect and love the work that smaller outfits do on the Web. They can unearth stories missed by the big media, can dig into the minutae of one singular story that catches their attention and shed light on some important topics. This I know.

But how effective is their reporting if no one knows it goes on? I’ll bet dollars to donuts that most of the people on the PI board crowing about the death of “old media dinosaurs” get most of their news from Web sites like HuffPo, Red State, Crosscut, and from cable news on the boob tube. Hardly bastions of independence or small-scale community reporting if you ask me. Which leaves the small-scale reporter, running a blog out of his basement or the local coffee shop where exactly? Probably with a devoted but very small following, little income and less effectiveness.

In short, the work that newspapers can and have done in the past is vitally necessary in this world and more so than ever before. When the plethora of online news outlets are simply aggregators, pulling “free” content that was produced by “old” media, who will provide the resources to agressively cover a city/region/country/world as deeply as ours needs to be? Who will pay to send reporters to Darfur and break stories about corrupt politicians I’ve got news for you young’uns, unless you’re willing to pay for content, or have a brilliant business plan for making money online with content, no one is.

And that’s a sad state of affairs that I fear is leaving the citizenry less educated and ill informed.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 9th, 2009 at 5:17 pm and is filed under Just some ramblings, Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.