What’s to become of the Fourth Estate?
- LA Times more cuts to pages, personnel – Associated Press
Someone please come up with the business model to keep serious journalism alive in this country.
Several newspapers around the country have announced yet another round of budget cuts – many of which are coming right out of their newsrooms. Foreign bureaus mostly became a thing of the past for large newspapers years ago. The numbers of reporters assigned to state executive branches and legislatures has diminished, you can see it in our own Ohio media. You can’t count on television. At the local level, including cities such as Columbus, Clevleand, and Cincinnati news coverage on local tv is superficial or sensationalist. Smaller media market tv news is downright unintelligible. As for the networks, including cable news, one word for most of it: fluff.
The best quality information, crafted to any ongoing standards of objectivity, facts, and ethics is now only regularly found in the news operations of daily newspapers. I can see promise in the “new” media, but it’s still gunslinger territory and I wouldn’t stake my professional reputation at work on information gleaned from a blog. In fact, this blog only works because of the information in the “clips” or links to stories from the media, usually respected newspapers.
With all the problems this country is facing it’s extremely unfortunate everytime a professional news organization has to scale back. What fills the void is worse than nothing, it’s usually background noise. It doesn’t do anything to educate or move a debate forward.
One thing we can all do is subscribe to our local paper. I subscribe to the local paper, even though I read it online before I even take it off the porch in the morning. (Except for Sundays, there’s still something about the Sunday paper …)
