The end of Print

Andrew has a terrific column at the Times Online about the future of newsprint and the role of blogging in accelerating its demise. 

"Take the newspaper industry. It has been faltering badly under the pressure of new media for a few years. For much of the past decade, circulation for all papers has been declining at about 2% a year. The last year has been a test case of sorts. Newspapers had the story of a lifetime: an election campaign of historic interest, suspense, drama and personality. From Hil-lary to Barack, from John Edwards’s love child to Sarah Palin’s Down’s syndrome child, from John McCain’s wild lunges for relevance to the first black president, it was the kind of year in which circulation should have boomed. If you live for a story, this year was an embarrassment of riches."

His arguments are flawless, but I wish he would have devoted a little more space to recognizing the true differences between 'opinion-mongers' like him, and the journalists who go out there and discover the facts themselves.

Opinion dominates the blogosphere, no question, but what would people like me, sitting in front of their laptops at 1 in the morning, opine about if there was no primary source from which we could glean the facts and then monger on about? Blogging would lose all substantive meaning and relevance without the direct relationship to traditional news media, not to mention the serious loss of credibility once NYTimes, Washington Post, and other majors go belly up and I'm forced to links to say, oh I dunno, the Chechen Times for the primary story.

I also wonder how the shrinking print industry has been affecting wire services like AP and Reuters. Their target market is somewhat more diversified catering to online outlets as well, but these sources have a veritable monopoly on foreign news coverage. Dead-tree publishing closed all their foreign bureaus long ago in the original round of cost-cutting, in the late 70's and 80's. Andrew didn't mention this and I haven't got the figures, but if the wire-services are also in financial trouble, that would portent an even worse fate for the blogosphere. Without the reporting of the raw facts on the ground that inject new life into the online debates, the blogosphere will morph into simulacrum.