Thursday, March 12, 2009

The ongoing death of journalism

The Rocky Mountain News does not pass quietly.

Reporters from the now-defunct Colorado daily are blogging on a site that looks remarkably like the former paper's online version. Good for them.

I've been talking to a co-worker about this, following the Seattle P-I in their downward spiral. She used to be an editor for that paper so has insights to its demise. It's a disturbing trend, mostly because we still need what these people do, it's just that no one's yet figured out a good business model for it in the online world.

We get our news aggregated for us, but that's only worked as long as it has because there are still reporters working local beats. Once they're all out of work, what will there be to be aggregated? AP stories are great, but you can't get all your news there.

Here's a piece on the RMN and the blog that followed it in Finding Dulcinea, a really cool blog and info portal/aggregator that serves a new purpose but, like others, won't fill the gap left by the death of local reporting.



http://www.findingdulcinea.com/news/business/2009/march/A-Newspaper-Turns-into-a-Blog--and-Other-Experiments-in-Online-Journalism.html

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