Columbia Journalism Review editorialises:
"CJR’s running total of journalists laid off or bought out since January 2007 was 11,250 by mid-February, and we surely missed some. Our fear is that America won’t realize what it has lost until the mainstream press is a ninety-pound weakling—online, on paper, on whatever. In the words of Joseph Pulitzer, at the start of a paragraph that sits on a brass plaque in the building where we work, “Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together….”
We see some faint reasons for hope. For one, even though the handcuffs of investor expectations and towering stacks of debt are all too real, and even though the challenges to the financial model that supports newsgathering are truly profound, those troubles have been conflated with the recession. Ad revenue didn’t fall off a cliff until the recession got under way. And the recession will end. Second, even while newspapers in particular waited way too long to wrestle seriously with the Web, the smarter ones are doing so. More important, a mighty public appetite for serious reporting and analysis remains. The Times, whose death Hirschorn so blithely predicts, reaches an average of nearly twenty million unique visitors on the Web every month, and each visitor spends on average of more than a half an hour each day. Research by Steven S. Ross, editor of Broadband Properties (and the author of our Craigslist-didn’t-do-it piece on page 8), indicates that newspapers as a whole are gaining online readers far faster than they are losing print readers. Also, it seems obvious to us that, given the new administration and the savage economy, Americans are more interested in reporting than at any time since 9/11.
Finally, there is great and healthy innovation and ferment, both outside and inside the mainstream media, as journalists and engaged citizens collectively search for an economic support system for reporting. Connecting appetite and innovation to income will not be easy, but we don’t really have a choice."
"CJR’s running total of journalists laid off or bought out since January 2007 was 11,250 by mid-February, and we surely missed some. Our fear is that America won’t realize what it has lost until the mainstream press is a ninety-pound weakling—online, on paper, on whatever. In the words of Joseph Pulitzer, at the start of a paragraph that sits on a brass plaque in the building where we work, “Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together….”
We see some faint reasons for hope. For one, even though the handcuffs of investor expectations and towering stacks of debt are all too real, and even though the challenges to the financial model that supports newsgathering are truly profound, those troubles have been conflated with the recession. Ad revenue didn’t fall off a cliff until the recession got under way. And the recession will end. Second, even while newspapers in particular waited way too long to wrestle seriously with the Web, the smarter ones are doing so. More important, a mighty public appetite for serious reporting and analysis remains. The Times, whose death Hirschorn so blithely predicts, reaches an average of nearly twenty million unique visitors on the Web every month, and each visitor spends on average of more than a half an hour each day. Research by Steven S. Ross, editor of Broadband Properties (and the author of our Craigslist-didn’t-do-it piece on page 8), indicates that newspapers as a whole are gaining online readers far faster than they are losing print readers. Also, it seems obvious to us that, given the new administration and the savage economy, Americans are more interested in reporting than at any time since 9/11.
Finally, there is great and healthy innovation and ferment, both outside and inside the mainstream media, as journalists and engaged citizens collectively search for an economic support system for reporting. Connecting appetite and innovation to income will not be easy, but we don’t really have a choice."
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