Guardian - In the past decade, as a percentage, more print journalists have lost
their jobs than workers in any other significant American industry.
(That bad news is felt just as keenly in Britain where a third of
editorial jobs in newspapers have been lost since 2001.) The worst of
the cuts, on both sides of the Atlantic, have fallen on larger local
daily papers at what Americans call metro titles.
A dozen historic
papers have disappeared entirely in the US since 2007, and many more are
ghost versions of what they used to be, weekly rather than daily,
freesheets rather than broadsheets, without the resources required to
hold city halls to account or give citizens a trusted vantage on their
community and the world.
The reasons for this decline are familiar – the abrupt shift from
print to pixels, the exponential rise in alternative sources of
information, changes in lifestyle and reading habits, and, above all,
the disastrous collapse of the city paper’s lifeblood – classified
advertising – with the emergence of websites such as Craigslist and
Gumtree. The implications are less often noted
1 comment:
Not to mention that print gladly ceded its Fourth Estates obligations elsewhere. Print, as an ostensible forth tier within our republic's system of checks and balances has become AWOL. They've abandoned their civil obligations and as a result the public no longer feels obliged to read the insipid drivel oozing from their presses.
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