When City Papers Fold, What Happens to the City?
With the onset of an economic recession, failing ad revenue, and, of course, the growing interest in receiving news instantaneously via the web and other social networking means, the future of print journalism, especially that of city papers is left with a big question mark plastered on their front pages. Last week,
Steve Wolf on Wed, Dec 31, 2008 at 11:28am
A critical topic, and one that merits more in-depth discussion than found here, although this is a good start. My suggestion: Find out what editors and reporters working for urban newspapers have to say on this topic. That kind of enterprise journalism—actually going out to solicit comment, then accurately conveying what you find—is one quality that distinguishes print pubs from the world of online reporting—which, as here, often seems merely to collate information from print sources. When newspapers shrink (or if they disappear), who will do the legwork, maintain the city hall bureaus, and cover the nuts-and-bolts beats that yield a portrait of how a community works and how well it’s being governed? Online sources can’t hope to deliver that contnet unless they undertake all of these functions. Endless rumination, no matter how informed, won’t replace enterprise reporting and hard facts.
As a footnote, is it too much to expect THIS site to run its authors’ posts through a copy-editing regime like that found on…most newspapers? This post contains at least four obvious mechanical errors that any junior copy editor would have flagged and fixed (kind of ironic, given the topic, no?). Your site looks great, but, as with much on the web, content doesn’t always rise to match the level of presentation.
Diana Lind on Wed, Dec 31, 2008 at 11:37am
Thanks, Steve, for your comment. Alas, we have no copy-editing regime, basically because we can’t afford one. In 2009 we are adding another editor, but for all of 2008 there was just one editor (me) for all the print content of the magazine and the web content. Welcome to the wild west of the Internet!