(Blog Post) newspaper, not just in their print form but in their electronic versions too, are old-fashioned things--technologically obsolete, as reasonably happens to hundred-year-old industries. fundamentally, news organizations are about restricting access to news. Full Story »
Posted by Patricia L'Herrou
As it happens today with e-journalists – using the term VERY loosely and meaning those who write primarily and in many cases, exclusively for on-line media – they are often incapable of looking at the big picture for one of the same reasons they charge that print newspapers are going down for the count, gatekeeping. There is no singular event, development, discovery, movement or evolution that can be pinpointed for the demise of print news. While there are things that played bigger roles (technological revolution, news aggregation, 24-hour cable news proliferation, near-depression-like economy) it is fallacy to take such a microscopic/here-and-now view of things as it pertains to the demise of newspapers and "traditional" journalism. We are faced with three generations since Baby Boomers who have SASS (Short Attention Spam Syndrome) and a quick-fix/shortcut mentality to seemingly everything, including trying to explain “why” before we have done the proper amount of research, interpreted that research, studied the trends and the pressure factors to know all aspects of a problem before being able to develop an effective solution. As the old saying goes, you can have it fast and cheap, but it won’t be good.
The demise of print journalism started in 1928 when Kolin Hager read the news and weather reports in front of a microphone and a video camera at a station in Schenectady, New York. That was some 238 years after Benjamin Harris published the first issue in the colonies of his newspaper, Public Occurrences Both Foreign and Domestic. Economy, scandal, backward thinking management, refusal to develop a new operations paradigm, community cheerleading in place of quality journalism, advocacy rather than reporting and certainly the last 20 years of technological development are just a few of the factors that have created today's tatterdemalion called the newspaper industry.