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Newspapers might vanish, too, if they continue to 'dream of past dominance while taking their product and trying to fit it into their competitor's terrain.'
In 1990, at the height of the Pacific Northwest battle over whether to cut the last virgin "old growth" timber, many loggers and sawmill owners panicked. Their specialty was cutting and sawing giant trees and, if the national forest supply disappeared, their equipment and skills were obsolete. Environmentalists were not sympathetic. These woods workers, they argued, were no different than the buggy whip makers put out of work when the automobile arrived. After all, times do change.
Today, the availability of inexpensive digital cameras and recorders, the triumph of the Internet, and the explosion of amateur Web-based publishing-MySpace. com, blogs, e-mails and Web sites-puts similar stress on those of us who remember the "good old days" of fat and sassy monopoly newspapers. When anyone can record and post information-the commodity for which reporters, editors, producers and photographers are paid-journalists are in danger of becoming a luxury society no longer can afford.
The direct cause of shrinking news staffs is a loss of advertising and circulation to new digital competition. But my questions-and they are still only questions-are whether recent layoffs because of loss of revenue are only part of the technological earthquake. Will the ubiquity of information make traditional journalism less valuable or even obsolete?
Thinking Ahead
To paraphrase Andy Warhol, in the future everyone will be a journalist for 15 minutes. When crime victims can post wrenching accounts of assaults (and accompanying photos of bruises) and politicians bypass the press with Web-based campaigns, then the role journalists traditionally play is being usurped. Instead of sitting in the front row of history being made, we're now two or three rows back at hurricanes, tsunamis, wars and campaigns, with our view sometimes obstructed by on-the-spot, competing amateurs whose accounts of the event provide immediacy, passion and, yes, rumor, exaggeration and misinterpretation.
That's exactly the point, journalists protest. We aren't simply descriptive witnesses of spot news, but careful, accurate and fair reporters of what we observe. We collect vast amounts of disparate information and synthesize it into coherent stories. We cover the whole range of news, not the day's fancy...