Newspapers take one too many

Newspapers are dropping below the fold and migrating off the back page and into oblivion. The latest is the Rocky Mountain News, nearly 150 years old, which has bowed (while still furiously scribbling) to its corporate overlords and, I'm going to go ahead and say it, stopped the presses forever.

For years technologists have been saying there's no place for newspapers now that blogs exist. There's no viable business model by leaning on advertising, expecially in the current economic climate. Content is "appropriated" almost as soon as it's posted, and readers can view it in a thousand different places, with different slants that feed their prejudices.

It's been estimated by an editor at Salon that up to 80% of the content that is available, (or spun, or challenged, or riffed off of) through online sources originates in newspapers. There are at least two concerns: the reduction of budgets that allow the resource-intensive investigative reporting that may be essential to a a functioning American democracy, and the absence of journalists as signal men, able to stay alert for years on bureaucratic beats, where once in a while, someone tries to pull a fast one. Examples abound--small town boards of education that in some cases regularly try to replace science classes with creationism, and all but invisible city departments that somehow repeatedly manage to put money before public safety.

I don't think all newspapers will fall. But I expect there will be an increase of small towns that will have to "self police." The concern is if journalists are replaced by new media people that are cherry-picking their news to feed a specific agenda (in a less sophisticated and more egregious way than some corporations already do), and don't have the resources of training or legal backing to replace newspapers.

Yes, it's a snowballing worry. But it has some merit. It's possible that small, lightweight news organizations (not sure they'll be newspapers) will step up and take over. But before that happens unchecked graft will get through without anyone listening, or the wrong person listening.