Great article on a photojournalist's chronicling of the stark decline of journalism as a profession; the focus is on the US (Philadelphia Enquirer) but there is sadly common ground with the UK. I also tackle the term '
disruption' later in this post, a useful one in the context of web 2.0, digitisation, UGC and suchlike...:
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| Steacy's artfully expressed study captures impact of digitisation |
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 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.
Stephan Salisbury, a prize-winning culture writer at the Philadelphia Inquirer
for the past 36 years, puts them like this: “Newspapers stitch people
together, weaving community with threads of information, and literally
standing physically on the street, reminding people where they are and
what they need to know. What happens to a community when community no
longer matters and when information is simply an opportunity for niche
marketing and branding in virtual space? Who covers the mayor? City
council? Executive agencies? Courts?… It is this unravelling of our
civic fabric that is the most grievous result of the decline of our
newspapers. And it is the ordinary people struggling in the city who
have lost the most, knowing less and less about where they are – even as
the amount of information bombarding them grows daily at an astounding
rate.”
Here's the quote the post title refers to; one you could quote possibly memorise as a great way of developing the basic point that a 'free press' are the cornerstone of our democracy (or, at least, our democratic theory!) ...
