Link: Our Opinion: Seeking answers? | Editorial.
You know it's bad when things get this grim. The losses of more than five dozen well-paying journalism jobs sort of pale in comparison to what a community loses in the form of its collective memory of itself and its history.
And as The Wire's David Simon has been pointing out to the Senate and to anyone else who will listen (Bill Moyers, Bill Maher), we are about to enter an inglorious boom-time for corruption, from the small town petty kind (how big the automatic kickback for the building permit or zoning change?) to the massive scale Enron- and Maddoff-style fleecing of civil society on a level folks right now probably can't begin to imagine.
Simon is also refreshing for pointing out (as I would also) that this gutting, this hollowing out of the journalistic endeavor began in the late 1980s and reached a kind of height in the flush, 30% corporate journalism profit days of the 1990s, when the corporate coffers were overflowing with carpet-bagger cash, and journalists still faced low salaries and almost constant rounds of layoffs. As they have since. You can set your watch by them.
Apparently the corporate media monopolies have deliberately set out to kill their journalistic audience/community-voice host.
I've stopped posting on the topic as much because there is really little left to say, beyond rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic or "Thinking the Unthinkable" with Clay Shirky. Once you get there, you can rage, rage against the dying of the light all you want, but journalism as we know it is going going going into that good night.
Maybe I still have a little rage left in me, for the Kabuki Play of public relations material winkingly packaged as "journalism" that the hollowed out remnants of newspapers and other supposedly fourth estate enterprises will become, or perhaps have already become.
Chris Stomps Her Foot and Shakes Fist!
There. I feel better. For about 10 minutes.
Link: Our Opinion: Seeking answers? | Editorial.
Editorial
Our Opinion: Seeking answers?
Published: 05.16.2009
For
those of you looking to this space for perspective on the Citizen's
demise, for those looking for What It All Means - you are looking in
the wrong place.
Excuse us, but we're a little too close to the
situation right now.
Do you ask someone how it feels when a relative dies after a long
bout with cancer? After all, we knew the end was coming for months.
But here's a revelation: When death comes, even if it's not supposed to be a shock . . . it's still a shock.
[...]
Those of us who have explored Tucson's, uh, challenging employment
environment know we won't be making anywhere near the money we make
now. Bottom line for Tucson: More than five dozen well-paying jobs lost.
But a newspaper isn't just any company. It's a repository of the city's collective memory and of our aspirations and hopes.
Healthy journalism equates with a vibrant city. A dead paper is analogous to the city's libraries closing - a chilling prospect.
• To all those bloggers and "citizen journalists" who, if you
believe the Internet, are this close to reinventing the industry,
here's your opportunity.
Now is your chance to cover never-ending board meetings, make
Freedom of Information Act requests to dislodge facts from public
officials, call sources - you have cultivated sources, right? - and
otherwise do what we in our dying industry like to call "reporting."
To do it right, you'll have to work eight to 10 hours a day, five to six days a week.
If it sounds like a job, not a hobby, it is. But don't expect to get paid; apparently, that business model has been discredited.
We're rooting for you. Public officials need vigilant scrutiny if
our dollars are to be wisely spent and public policies are to be sane
and progressive. So good luck with that.
[...]
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