Now even Citizen Kane’s San Francisco Chronicle is in danger of shutting down.
Already, the Chicago-based Tribune Co., Philadelphia Newspapers Inc., the Journal-Register chain and the Minneapolis Star Tribune have filed for bankruptcy protection. The Chronicle has its own financial troubles.
Daily newspapers in print are a dying medium.
The Internet not only provides the news free, and free of most advertising, but it proves what journalists already knew: that collecting and reporting the news is fun, so much fun that millions of people are willing to do it for little or no pay.
New journalism. We can condescend and call the bloggers amateurs who don’t know news from noise, but it’s becoming clearer every day that bloggers and other Internet information sources are no more or less reliable than newspapers, and that online readers quickly sort out the trustworthy from the trash.
For now, it’s sad to see the passing of an entire industry. Print newspaper circulation is dropping fast. Soon we’ll have few printed dailies. But journalism will go on.
The fictional Citizen Kane once said “it would be fun to run a newspaper.” And like real newspaper publishers, he had his fun and died.
Rosebud.
Frank Warner
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