The New Yorker has an article this month about the state of newspaper journalism (hint: it’s not good).

It’s a must read for anyone in the industry or anyone thinking about going into it. Here are a couple of gems from the article:

“Since 1990, a quarter of all American newspaper jobs have disappeared.”

“Only nineteen per cent of Americans between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four claim even to look at a daily newspaper. The average age of the American newspaper reader is fifty-five and rising.”

“According to “Abandoning the News,” published by the Carnegie Corporation, thirty-nine per cent of respondents under the age of thirty-five told researchers that they expected to use the Internet in the future for news purposes; just eight per cent said that they would rely on a newspaper.”

“The Web provides a powerful platform that enables the creation of communities; distribution is frictionless, swift, and cheap.”

That’s why when I say it’s time to panic, it is time to panic!

There is nothing cyclical about what is happening to newspapers. Even when the economy comes roaring back, newspapers that haven’t changed will still continue to die. We need to radically rethink the product.

But America needs newspapers. Newspapers have long been the keepers of democracy by investing large amounts of resources into original reporting. That’s why newspapers need to realize that just because print is dying, doesn’t mean they have to do die.

I’ll leave you with this final passage from The New Yorker:

Finally, we need to consider what will become of those people, both at home and abroad, who depend on such journalistic enterprises to keep them safe from various forms of torture, oppression, and injustice. “People do awful things to each other,” the veteran war photographer George Guthrie says in “Night and Day,” Tom Stoppard’s 1978 play about foreign correspondents. “But it’s worse in places where everybody is kept in the dark.” Ever since James Franklin’s New England Courant started coming off the presses, the daily newspaper, more than any other medium, has provided the information that the nation needed if it was to be kept out of “the dark.” Just how an Internet-based news culture can spread the kind of “light” that is necessary to prevent terrible things, without the armies of reporters and photographers that newspapers have traditionally employed, is a question that even the most ardent democrat in John Dewey’s tradition may not wish to see answered.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at 1:45 pm and is filed under State of journalism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.