In keeping with a side topic on another thread, I thought this was a well written article. The subject, a tragedy, both on a personal level for journalists and as a society that depends on a free exchange of ideas, with some intelligence and hopefully balance filtering the telling.
Very good story about a slow-motion train wreck. If you go by the comments online, it seems like everyone is gloating over the death of the news media (when they’re usually ranting against one talking head or columnist whose opinions don’t mirror theirs) … but there are so many ways that this is wrong for the country.
Just for starters, it is true that coverage of the local scene has been abandoned just about everywhere, and where there are no watchdogs, corruption will flourish.
Not to mention, the layoffs – and I know so, so many of these people – seem to be targeted. From the article:
“‘We have a lot of anecdotal information that indicates newspaper newsrooms have reverted back to older, whiter and male-dominated,’ said Melissa Nelson, director of collective bargaining for the Newspaper Guild, in an e-mail. But there are no hard numbers, she added."
Which means that the people who are left will be even less likely to represent the demographics of the country.
The death of real journalism is worth some kind of monetary public/private intervention – there are moves, in fits and starts, to attempt something like this, but they’re patchwork at best and mostly national in scope. And nobody wants official government intervention, even if it would save the industry.
But Americans kind of deserve what they end up with. When cat videos garner 6 million views and stories about the latest transportation spending bill, or cuts to education funding or taxes or budgets or local elections get almost no views, then yeah, the people running the news operations are gonna spend more money on the cat video side of things.
Journalism is not “easy.” It’s like eating your vegetables sometimes, but if nobody is covering the “boring” stuff, really terrifying things can happen. Bad laws get passed, crimes get committed, bureaucracies get bloated and useless. People love to read TMZ, but really, the stuff that’s affecting them daily? Notsomuch.