Britannica Blog launched a series of posts today on Newspapers and the Net. The seed essay in this case is a passage from Nick Carr's The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google about how the economics of unbundling are threatening newspapers.
My response is first up. In it, I agree with Carr's assessment about the end of the economics that have supported newspapers, and then ask 'What's next?'
My answer to that question is encapsulated in the title: What Journalism Needs Now: Experimentation, Not Nostalgia .
LinkWe should stop worrying about the newspaper as a whole, and instead turn our attention to the important question: taking unbundling as a given, what bits merit saving? It isn't the physical fact of newsprint, or the expensive yet ineffective classified ads, or having a movie reviewer in every town.
What's worth saving, as a critical function, is investigative journalism. We need someone, many someones, to do long, deep, boring research, for stories that may not even pan out. Without that, government at all levels will simply slide back into the nepotism and corruption of the 19th century.
That is the challenge we need to take on, and as Carr notes, it's not one currently being met well on the Internet.
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