Newspaper Futures

As readers of this blog will know, I am ambivalent about the emerging M.O. of online journalism. I think original reporting available to more people at lower cost is great news. I think editorializing from informed but partisan experts is a good thing in so much as it engages people to be active citizens even as it educates them. I think the trend of taking the link—the ability to connect disparate ideas—and using it as a license to eschew logic and connect anything you please is bad. I think the claim by link-evangelists that their denial of verifiable truth is more intellectually honest than the imperfect, but well-intentioned, search for objectivity that characterizes traditional print is the worst of all.

I feel compelled to summarize the above stances again in light of a recent article by Michael Hirschorn in the Atlantic Monthly. Hirschorn makes the case that the current financial crisis will speed up the (he says) inevitable bankruptcies of various print organizations, and takes up the NYT as an example. Read the rest of this entry »