R.I.P., Rocky Mountain News.... the Denver paper I delivered as a boy. The news of its closure the other day made me sad, in a nostalgic way... but it was at least tempered by the fact that the paper's owner, the Denver Post, will continue printing its flagship daily.
Now, with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer announcing that it will become a Web-only paper, and that its last print edition will come out tomorrow, it's clear that this is more than just a few isolated incidents. What's the old line... one is an exception, two is a coincidence, three is a trend.... and here we are at four. Probably even more, if Time's list of newspapers in the ICU is even close to being accurate.
Internet and media maven Clay Shirky has posted a fascinating (if lengthy) essay on the trend he's been touting for years now. It's worth a read, but to cut to the chase, here are his final thoughts:
For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.
Personally, I'm conflicted. I guess because on the tee-vee side of the media playground, we've been watching a similar trend developing for a long, long time; as newsrooms "rationalise" their workforces -- and correspondingly, their coverage -- in ever-more irrational ways. But so far, although we've seen overseas bureaux close left and right, and the appetite for international news wane to the point of anorexia, we haven't actually seen broadcasters stop doing news altogether.
Which is, I guess, the glimmer of hope in the announcement from the P-I -- at least they'll still be doing an online version. Won't be the same, but at least it's not gone entirely. Of course, they'll be trying to do the same thing, but with fewer staff, fewer resources, less of a profile, all the attendant difficulties implied by the change.
I feel the pain of my print colleagues, and I share their concerns for the practice of journalism going forward (few more eloquently voiced than by former hack David Simon, creator of "The Wire"). But I've also long since migrated almost all of my print news attention to the Internet, and so I am somewhat less dismayed by the loss of a "dead-tree" daily paper. I'm aware that every time I click on another online article, I hammer another tiny nail in the coffin of the print edition. And while I do feel vaguely guilty about contributing to this trend, it really does seem inevitable.
But I hope Clay Shirky's right, and that journalism isn't dead, and that it's just the form that's changing. Otherwise, God help us all.
