Since Operation MOCKINGBIRD, twas never thus…

How about this scenario to set your teeth on edge: in a couple of years, the only journalistic enterprises left standing could be Murdoch’s. This isn’t so far-fetched: where I live, in Brooklyn all the local papers are now owned by Newscorp. Or consider Italy, where essentially all the TV stations are owned by Silvio Berlusconi, the country’s absurd Prime Minister.

The sort of sanguine “futurism” illustrated by this series of boingboing posts is really irritating.

@FALCON SEVEN: When I was a boy my father worked at a financial newsletter. It was written in an office building in downtown Manhattan, and the presses were in the basement! (This was the 1960s.) One of the guys who worked the linotypes made a slug with my name on it.

Agreed. But this will combine to be an aggregate coverage.

“Why are people acting so shocked by the end of newspapers?”

Two things.

First, the end has come quicker than many (though not me, a long-noted “pessimist” among my friends in the industry) expected. They thought they had a decade or so, and instead it is all collapsing within the next year or two.

Second, it’s not the end of newspapers that worries us. It’s the expected loss of 50-80% of the professional reporting in this country.

Countless blogs, event calendars, television, radio … all of these things could be aggregated with a high degree of personalization.

This is a golden opportunity. Plenty of people have complained about the media for decades. We no longer need to buy ink by the barrel, or a press, or trucks or paperboys. The word democracy comes to mind.

But I have to ask: Why are people acting so shocked by the end of newspapers? This has been a staple of sci-fi movies set in the Future as long as there have been sci-fi movies set in the Future.

People read screens or walk through holograms. They drink news out of colorful bottles or they have electrodes mainline news into their brains.

Newspapers have never existed in the sci-fi Future.

Is what I intended to type. Apologies.

What happens to the people who have paid ahead for their subscriptions or ads with the physical paper? Somehow I don’t see them giving the money back.

They’re switching us over to the Seattle Times.

It doesn’t look good. Everyone I know in the industry has Seattle as the first no-newspaper town in the deadpools. The only question is whether it happens in late 2009 or early 2010.

But it will happen. And other towns will follow.

Seriously, why hasn’t this happened sooner? That speaks to the staying power of entrenched industries. I’m just glad that newspapers aren’t also getting bailouts like GM, Ford, and Chrysler do, or like farmers receive agricultural subsidies.

This isn’t the end of news, people. Just the end of communicating it via pulped dead trees shipped to your doorstep in fossil-fuel consuming trucks.

Newspapers weren’t put out of business because the news wasn’t good enough (more people are reading the stories newspapers reporters produce than ever before) or because the printing became too expensive. They aren’t being replaced by something better.

They are dying because they were in a symbiotic relationship with companies that sell advertising, and those companies *were* replaced by their version of the horseless carriage (or more accurately, by mass production that flooded the market with advertising options).

It’s much, much closer to the end of news than you realize.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/17/business/media/17paper.html?hp

There will be, as of tomorrow, 20 people covering Seattle, where there were 165 yesterday. The new online “newspaper” is yet another opinion journal, not a source of news. The other newspaper, the Seattle Times, is tottering.

Those of you saying that new media will replace the newspapers please tell me: how is the city to be covered if there’s no revenue to pay reporters.

The people of Seattle will know much less about what is going on in their town.

Time will hopefully show it to be an innovative proactive way to preserve the newspaper, without bankrupting the papers in the process.

The world ended for a lot of those guys today.

As sad as this all is, I can’t help but think of Clay Shirky’s Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable blog post:

So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?

I don’t know. Nobody knows. We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it… We just got here. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.

If people want news, they’ll make sure they get news somehow. It’s impossible, though, to know right now what that “somehow” will be. Hopefully, the slow death of newspapers will sow the seeds of the future of journalism.

This is terrible for the people, in a lot of industries, who are facing wrenching change — and we could and should do a much better job of helping them through these transitions. But all of this is part of a market-based economy.

Thank you, Inkstain, for clarifying that.
Whenever somebody says “See? The world didn’t END!” it usually means it ended for more than a few folks.

The newspaper industry employed 69k people in 2006 as reporters or copy editors. I think you’ll likely see that number shrink to 20k by the end of 2010, with very few “alternative media” looking to hire to replace them (well, I’ll be honest, “us”). Add in the several thousand journalism majors that schools pump out every year, and you are looking at 60k unemployed journalists.

Not a huge thing on the larger scale of things, but that’s a big hit.

I’m not proposing any solutions, I don’t think there are any. I’m just saying what I see :)

Don’t be such a downer, dude. There’s always jobs at Walmart.