David Carr of The New York Times writes a nuanced, sensitive piece on what will become of newspapers and the people who make them in an age where their major reason for being is the same as McDonald's and Wal-Mart's reason for being: to make investors happy. Carr's piece focuses on The Philadelphia Inquirer, a paper Knight Ridder built into one of the great institutions of U.S. journalism and just as quickly pulled down with its drive to extract a return from its property. But profit-hungry owners are not the only players in the great American newspaper crisis
Carr reports a conversation with a young Inquirer reporter, Michael Currie Schaffer, on the future of the newspaper business. Schaffer observes at one point:
"Something happened to our generation where we were not raised to do something that our parents did every day. I have friends here who are smart people, who are very well informed, but they don't feel the need to get a paper."
Yes, something has changed. But instead of probing further into that "something," which is really a galaxy of things, Carr backs off the subject with only Schaffer's vague statement that "I'm interested in what comes next, and some of those versions of the future are pretty unappealing to me."
Maybe a discussion of where journalism is going ought to be reserved for the pages of academic journals or for professional journalism savants who live and breathe the topic and blog it, too. But I think the papers that have a stake in the future ought to be raising the volume of the conversation in their own pages, and doing it in explicit terms that explains what's at stake not only for committed reporters and editors but to all readers and to our society as a whole. To do less -- to do what Carr does in his well-crafted column is to settle for atmospherics and pass on the substance. That's not good enough if some remnant of the public-service-oriented news business is to survive.
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