Legal Research

Jefferson’s Rolling Over in His Grave

“The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” (Thomas Jefferson)

Tom, it looks like we’re gonna wind up with the former. It started with the Christian Science Monitor last autumn. They announced they would go all-digital by April 2009. Now, 16 months into a recession that scares the heck outta me, more papers are staring at mounting debt and declining ad revenues. The NY Times — they’re not doing so hot, either — had a story on the plight of newspapers yesterday.

“It’s not so much that everyone has a great plan, everybody is so desperate, they're looking at every possibility.”

That pithy quote is from John Yemma, editor of the CSM. And for now, Plan A appears to be “Go Digital”. Which is only slightly better than Plan B (”cease operations”):

“But no one yet has unlocked the puzzle of supporting a large newsroom purely on digital revenue, a fact that may presage an era of news organizations that are smaller, weaker and less able to fulfill their traditional function as the nation’s watchdog … Industry executives who once scoffed at the idea of an Internet-only product now concede that they are probably headed in that direction, but the consensus is that newspapers going all digital would become drastically smaller news sources for the foreseeable future.”

So if struggling newspapers bow to the inevitable and go all-digital, what are we going to end up with?

• Very little in-depth, investigative reporting

• A parochial view of what’s news

• Twitter will fill the void

Full post as published by Jenkins Webblits on March 12, 2009 (boomark / email).