What Will Happen to News?

First, read this.

This is the kind of story that makes a former journalist like me weep and gnash my teeth and feel old, outdated and sad.

Yesterday I spoke with a former colleague from the Los Angeles Times, Allison Cohen, who has started her own local newspaper, the Los Feliz Ledger. I am having her come talk to my UCSD class about new things people are doing. In her case she is jumping in to cover local news because the LA Times has given up on it completely, and people still care. She had just crunched her numbers and she did as well this year (when the stock market crashed) as she did the year before, when LA seemed to be booming. She was profitable in a year. And she is ready to start another paper, and start a little newspaper war. I won't say where. That is her secret.

But still she says she loses sleep wondering what will happen to news, to quality journalism, to newspapers.

I am an optimist--so I believe that newspapers and stories will continue in some form. That people will still want to know what is going on. That even if newspapers die eventually society will feel the lack of a watchdog and a new kind of news will spring up. Maybe the stories will be told differently, maybe it will all be on-line, but society will care what is going on, and will realize the value of having someone keep an eye on the government, the schools, the cops, the world--and writing that first, great rough draft of history.

But she had a different view. She said she wondered if people would just stop caring. She said maybe newspapers will die and no one will blink an eye. Maybe people will just swallow tiny blurbs on-line of superficial coverage. She said newspapers are dying, news is getting thin, and she sees no great outcry from anyone except the journalists themselves.

I want to believe she is wrong.

But I can't stop thinking about what she said.