Gabriel Orgrease wrote:

> i have been wondering w/ all this talk about the plight of newspapers how
> you may be dealing w/ all that

The Ann Arbor News, Ann Arbor's century-plus-old daily newspaper shuts
down July 23, putting a great many out of work.

From that date forward, this city of over 100,000 population (metro
area about 400,000) will have no daily newspaper.

Instead, we will have the weekly Ann Arbor Journal (offspring of the
same chain that owns the small town weeklies around here), and the
web-site-based twice-weekly Ann Arbor Dot Com.

Oh, and there will still be the student-run Michigan Daily, five days
a week during the school year, with very little interest in anything
outside the boundaries of the University of Michigan.

In retrospect, I think the 20th century will be seen as the brief
golden era of authoritative, mainstream, mass audience, nonpartisan
news media.

We are in the process of returning to status quo ante, before high
speed printing presses, when no one could make any money from
publishing news.  Without profit as a possible motivator, the raison
d'etre of news media will only be propaganda .

In the 18th and 19th centuries, pretty much every newspaper was tied
to a political party or political sugar daddy.  In the 21st century,
we will have media catering to narrow shards of the shattered mass
audience, and "objective news" will seem quaint and archaic.

No news organization will ever again have the kind of reportorial
resources that metro newspapers and TV networks have today.  Yet
everyone will be taught not to trust anything from outside their
particular echo chamber, and no one will be in any position to sort
out radically different versions of the same "news".

The NY Times was one of the first to break out of the old model, and
it will be one of the last to succumb to the new one.

Ralph Walter wrote:

> Nice to know we've got a Mr. Glass-Half-Full among the rest of us Cassandras.

I think we're looking at a nearly empty glass in the very near future.

                                                     Larry

---
Lawrence Kestenbaum, [log in to unmask]
Washtenaw County Clerk & Register of Deeds, http://ewashtenaw.org
The Political Graveyard, http://politicalgraveyard.com
P.O. Box 2563, Ann Arbor, MI 48106

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