For someone who will see his little blog pass a half -million page views today, you’d think that a post entitled “The End of Newsprint” would be a ego-stroking report on the death of newspapers and the unstoppable emergence of the much mythologized “citizen journalism”.

But its not.

Reading Michael Hirschorn’s “End Times” article in Jan/Feb’s Atlantic yesterday, which chronicles the building death-knell of the hard-copy edition of The New York Times didn’t send me out into the night, twirling and laughing at my good fortune.  Actually, it just left me feeling very unsettled.

Hirschorn’s article documents the well-known descent of the newspaper industry and talks about how the NYT must make drastic changes over the next 5 months or it could default on $400 million in debt.  His analysis concludes that the death of newsprint is inevitable…and he’s probably right.

But my own foray into “citizen journalism” hasn’t done much to placate my fears that something substantial isn’t lost when print media goes entirely online.  Yes, newspapers have had this coming to them for an awfully long time.  In its own attempts of survive, our own AJC still claims that it covers the entire metro-Atlanta area, lulling people into a false sense of security that if news happens in their suburb, the AJC will be there to cover it.  But as we’ve seen here in Decatur, cutbacks have made it nearly impossible for our hometown paper to tell even half of the relevant stories the community should know about (Was there a peep out of the AJC regarding the Fellini’s robbery?).  The success of THIS site would not be possible without the cut backs at the AJC.  My questionably-humorous anecdotes about Decatur politics wouldn’t be able to compete with a paid staff of dedicated full-timers.

If this is where the future is heading, this site is definitely on the right side of the trend.  However, I still have a couple real concerns. Read the rest of this entry »