Flutterby™! : "Journalism" already dead, some people are noticing 2009-03-17 22:37:16.302761+00

"Journalism" already dead, some people are noticing

2009-03-17 22:37:16.302761+00 by Dan Lyke 3 comments

Scott Rosenberg: Berkeley J-School’s Chronicle panel: The horse-and-buggy set’s lament. With newspapers falling right and left, there's been a bunch of speculation about the future of news. There's been a kerfluffle over a proposed asphalt plant just south of Petaluma, and among the many laments about the situation is that the EIR and proposal for this seems to have been noticed only after the process was well under way:

How many people that you know actually READ the legal notices in the newspapers? Or go in every couple of weeks and ask the nice person at the library reference desk if they have any interesting new EIRs?

and the answer, of course, is WTF do we have a local paper for if not to do that?

The "journalists" have failed, and their institutions are dying because of that. The question is not "how do we save newspapers?", or even "how do we save news?", the question is "what are we going to build to replace those failures?"

I've been amazed for a long time that their EIRs and all other legal notices aren't available on the websites of every legal jurisdiction in the country.

I think it's just been a matter of graft as usual, with some lacky in the gov't rewarding one particular newspaper with the revenues. Even when there are two newspapers, the notices typically show up in only one.

what i think we lose when the big papers go down is the reporting staffs they supported to do investigative journalism. As of now, most of the consulted websites are just aggregators. Of course, as the big news media are gobbled up by conglomerate businesses, I've become suspect of their journalistic integrity. Is ABC going to find dirt on Disneyland, or NBC investigate GE? It's not just the loss of papers - it's the loss of independent primary news media of all styles.

Yeah, I asked my county supervisor for directions to find the EIR and have heard nothing back. I'm going to work to make sure he gets replaced come next election. And I need to get down to the town hall and see what openings on advisory boards there are, I know that stuff is coming up soon and I should be serving on one one of 'em.

I don't know how what structures we're going to build to replace the loss of investigative journalism, but it's been dying for years and we need to do something. We can bemoan the loss of it, but it's gone, and 'tis better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness.

The official voice of Hamilton County and Chattanooga is the Hamilton County Herald. It is where official legal notices get published. A judge ruled it is a newspaper. Laughing.. It is, but the only people that read it are lawyers and the government.