Newspapers and Journalism

Perhaps a discussion about Newspapers and Journalism is in order.  Recent days have seen  major reductions in print journalism.  The Times - Picayune of New Orleans moving to three day a week publishing and hoping to make up for the loss with a poorly conceived and executed web presence is an example.  Numerous reporters are let go or offered less lucrative employment in web based newsrooms.


The quality of news goes down as reporting is outsourced, sometimes to web based companies like Journalic, (a Tribune company) made famous for writers in the Philippines inventing local American bylines.  


A lot of people will shed no tear over the loss of newspapers and news journalism.  After all many of us, me included, get much of our news on the web.  That’s just great but, and it’s a big but, how much of that web based info do we really get and use?


I worry that results like the US History 2010 Report Card  that showed that only 17% of eighth graders and 12% of high school seniors were proficient in history are problematic.
Or in a Pew Research study, only half of the respondents knew that Abe Lincoln was a Republican or that less than sixty percent knew that Franklin Roosevelt was a Democrat. Those results also showed that the young (under thirty and presumably more web savvy) were much less well informed than those older and presumably more into print media.


You might ask what difference does it make?  Does the average American need to understand History and Politics?  I guess not, if you plan to miss the revolution, stay at home watching Reality TV while the rich and well educated put democracy out of reach for the rest of us.


Here’s where I start sounding like a conspiracy theorist.  What I think is that it is a mighty convenient thing for the poor and lower middle class to be mired in ignorance.  The upper classes have access to all the information and the means of making it hard for the rest of us to uncover that information.  You might say that the poor are lazy and don’t want to know.  I say that’s the same kind of B.S. that invents the myth of welfare queens and people who want to be on the dole. 


 No one wants to be ignorant or downtrodden.  Anyone who tells you that lie is a propagandist or a fool.  These are the same people who say that it’s OK for others to try to live on a wage of $10 per hour or less.  


So what should we do about the demise of newspapers and newspaper journalism?  I know one thing for sure, if we don’t think about it and talk about it, nothing will change.