I'm more than slightly sick of hearing that Journalism is dying. Mostly this is coming from print journalists who have finally noticed that the newspapers for which they work are going the way of the dodo. They whine and moan about the Web, and blogging, and how all of this is diluting the information stream and degrading the quality of reporting.
It's bullshit, every single cotton-pickin' word of it.
Look, I was a Journalism major. I dropped it because even then, in the early 80's, the medium was on its last legs. This is literally how my epiphany went: I looked around in class one day and said to myself, "These people are assholes. I don't want to spend the rest of my life working with assholes." I said it to myself in exactly those words, and then I went down to the Air Force recruiter and spent the next seven years of my life working with patriots instead. The problem was this: I wanted to report the news; they wanted to change the world. Specifically, they wanted to make it over in their image, driven as they were by an activist vision of journalism popularized by Lou Grant. Everyone wanted to be Joe Rossi or Billie Newman. More's the pity. As you've seen from the horribly and horrifically slanted media over the last three decades, there is absolutely no one in print media today who has any business whatsoever pulling out the "quality of reporting" argument in support of their own livelihoods. It's all shit and they know it.
As to what happens to the poor, pitiful newspapers... they die, just like the chandler, the lamplighter, or the farrier did at the turn of the last century. And does professional journalism die with them? Of course not, despite the outright blatant lies that these self-appointed purveyors of truth would disengenuously foist upon you.
CNN. FoxNews. MSNBC. ESPN. ABCnews...
Broadcast journalism has and will continue to take up the role that newspapers relinquish; not only in the broadcast media, but in the ephemeral text of the Web as well.
How stupid can newspaper journalists be not to notice? That's NOT a rhetorical question. You have to be a card-carrying moron* not to see that the future of journalism was sealed with the production of the first MovieTone reel. And to any print journalist who hasn't figured it out by now, I don't want anyone as stupid as you reporting anything.
Get a job.
* I apologize to legitimate morons for the comparison. You have a genetic excuse for you your lack of intelligence, and it's not your fault; whereas print journalists have chosen to feign retardation.
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