What will become of “democracy itself”?

I finished reading The New Yorker piece by Eric Alterman. It’s a fairly predictable but good synopsis of why newspapers are declining and blogs like Huffington Post are growing. I hope lots of people read it.

But I think The New Yorker missed an opportunity to explore a more urgent question: Now what?

Here’s how he concluded the piece:

And so even if one agrees with all of Huffington’s jabs at the Times, and Edsall’s critique of the Washington Post, it is impossible not to wonder what will become of not just news but democracy itself, in a world in which we can no longer depend on newspapers to invest their unmatched resources and professional pride in helping the rest of us to learn, however imperfectly, what we need to know.

Amen. I just wish Alterman had pushed big thinkers at business, public policy, and journalism schools to explore this question with us and perhaps even looked at what society might look like without newspapers’ “unmatched resources and professional pride” in journalism.

But then he might have been viewed as a newspaper lover right off the bat. And it seems that in today’s world, newspaper lovers are hopelessly unhip.

If I were a troublemaker, I would call on every reporter and editor in this country to go on strike for one week, just to see whether the public would take notice. I have a feeling that everyone would realize we’ve got an urgent public problem on our hands if newspapers lose what makes them special.

New Yorker rolls out the hearse

The New Yorker headline says it all:

Out of Print: The death and life of the American newspaper

I’ve been wanting to make a documentary on this crisis for about a year now. Anyone interested in sharing their story on camera?

The New Yorker piece seems anticlimatic, given we’ve been reading and hearing about this for years. But here’s one chunk that jumped out at me:

Arianna Huffington and her partners believe that their model points to where the news business is heading. “People love to talk about the death of newspapers, as if it’s a foregone conclusion. I think that’s ridiculous,” she says. “Traditional media just need to realize that the online world isn’t the enemy. In fact, it’s the thing that will save them, if they fully embrace it.”

And later…

At the Huffington Post, Jonah Peretti explains, the editors “stand behind our front page” and do their best to insure that only trusted bloggers and reliable news sources are posted there. Most posts inside the site, however, go up before an editor sees them. Only if a post is deemed by a reader to be false, defamatory, or offensive does an editor get involved.

…This policy is hardly without its pitfalls. During the Hurricane Katrina crisis, the activist Randall Robinson referred, in a post, to reports from New Orleans that some people there were “eating corpses to survive.” When Arianna Huffington heard about the post, she got in touch with Robinson and found that he could not support his musings; she asked Robinson to post a retraction. The alacrity with which the correction took place was admirable, but it was not fast enough to prevent the false information from being repeated elsewhere.

It’s amazing that only one in five Americans believe what they read in print. And yet it’s the blogs that take what newspapers find and chew it like cud, spinning it, stretching it and breaking it down until it meets their needs.