re: #586 Lincolntf

That story about the Boston Globe being in trouble from a couple days ago seems even more serious according to this one. Boston without the Globe will be a little strange.

Newspapers all over the country are shutting down or reducing distribution. Lots and lots of people now get their news from television or the Internet; and services like Craigslist have eaten into classified advertising revenue, which can make up around half of a newspaper’s revenue. Thanks to reduced circulation, traditional advertisers have also pushed lower rates. So things are rough across the board. In a downturn, newspapers are among the most vulnerable businesses.

As much as I would enjoy seeing the NYT crash and burn, this is a worrisome trend. It isn’t at all clear how any sort of reporting will take place without newspapers fielding actual reporters; without boots on the ground, all we have are the talking heads of television media and similar pundits on the Internet, neither of which acts as much more than repeaters of what’s released at news conferences. Exceptions are very thin on the ground, indeed, and there’s little incentive available to change that.

And there’s the problem of history. Right now, if a story gets published by even a second-rank newspaper, there are hundreds of thousands of copies of it scattered across the landscape, archived in people’s foyers, libraries, birdcages and dumps. Revising such hardcopied history is nearly impossible. Electronic media, on the other hand, leave no trace of having been altered, and (mostly) exist in a single place, or in very few central archives at most. The temptation to tamper with such archives certainly raises the incentive to do so. Embarrassing quotes, revelations, accusations or anything else that someone with sufficient power doesn’t want seen can very easily be erased, permanently, without leaving a trace. Such control over historical records lies somewhere between insanely difficult and impossible with the printed record that print journalism provides.