Requiem for the Printed Word

The cover of Time this week shows not the Person of the Year but a vanishing artifact–the American newspaper–and reflects, in a larger sense, the coming end of journalism as we know it.

After a lifetime of putting words and images on paper–selling them, if you will–the computer screen and the crashing economy are conspiring to make what I did obsolete. (The timely site “Newspaper Death Watch” should be expanded to “Printed Word Death Watch” as magazines and books go onto life support.)

But the obsolescence is more than technical (nobody wept for the makers of buggy whips)–it involves a basic change in how we all get our sense of the world around us and, in many ways, not for the better.

“During the past few months,” Walter Isaacson writes in Time, “the crisis in journalism has reached meltdown proportions. It is now possible to contemplate a time when some major cities will no longer have a newspaper and when magazines and network-news operations will employ no more than a handful of reporters.”

As a journalist in the last century and a blogger now, I can testify to what this may mean for the future–self-serving information from political and social institutions beset by vociferous electronic critics with few disinterested reporters to mediate their distortions.

Even worse will be the sure death of investigative journalism to tell the public what it has no other way of knowing it needs to know.

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