A rebuttal

Well, there’s quite a lively discussion going on in the Brittanica blog.

In fact, I so don’t think so that I am waiting for the moment for someone with some passion and some money to suggest it is time to start a newspaper. The cost of entry isn’t very great, the technology makes us all look brilliant and one might create a beast that has feet in the print and online world at the same time, from scratch, avoiding the ankle breaking bumps that plague “old media” when it tries to become “new media.”

It might be so local you can’t imagine how it would feel, but it would be a newspaper and it would tell people what happened that touches on their lives.

It would be free. It would be distributed to very rich demographic areas and it would be very smart about how it approached news and events. It’s staff would expand based on revenue, which would not come until distribution was wide enough to point to a solid audience. So people would have to live on gruel for a while.

It would do some interesting things. If you were getting married, for example, it might create a whole media production of it for a price, like a little commercial arm of the local news empire. You would get a video, a coffee table book full of pictures and text, goodies. It would cost, say, a couple of thousand dollars. Very high quality and very dependable.It might do the same thing with the local high school football, basketball or soccer team. It might track the efforts of your choir. I do believe those kinds of things would produce revenue, mainly because most people don’t have the time to learn how to do them. Does that present an ethical challenge? Wait and see. I don’t think it’s inherent. Anyhow, it would be no more of an ethical challenge than building your business on used car ads and then telling everyone as often as you can how great it is to have a car!

…Having read my own paper, and the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal for years, I must admit, sadly, that they don’t present a very clear picture of what actually is happening in the lives of common people. That’s too bad because that is where journalism’s connection should come from.