03.23.09
Dragons
Journalism is quickly traveling into uncharted territory and I’m afraid that beyond here there be dragons
Following in the footsteps of the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Ann Arbor News has announced it will cease its print publication in July. I have a sinking feeling that this is merely the beginning of an industry collapse caused by a combination of a bad economy and an unwillingness to respond to changing times.
Sure, some papers will operate as a Web-only local news outlet but it remains to be seen whether they will offer the same level and quality of journalism. Admitting that we don’t know is being optimistic. Newspapers never developed the same revenue strategy for Web ads as they did print so it’s doubtful they could support the same overhead.
Communities will be either losing their newspapers altogether or losing a good portion of the content. Nobody is quite sure of the impact on the citizens in those unlucky areas but the effects on the journalists and workers at the closed papers is obvious. They’re unsure of the future and looking for lessons in dragon slaying.
Paul said,
April 2, 2009 at 9:21 am
The sad part to this is that there will be more stories that never get told. It’s incredible how much other media outlets use newspaper reporting to present stories. I think this is a tremendous blow to each community that loses publication. I also don’t see a quick fill in and citizen reporting will be spotty at best, so we all suffer from this…not just a newspaper going out of business.