Print media decline

David Carr laments in "As print media declines" that the "sky is falling" in print media:

"It has been an especially rotten few days for people who type on deadline. Just Tuesday, The Christian Science Monitor announced that, after a century, it would cease publishing a weekday paper. Time Inc., the Olympian home of Time magazine, Fortune, People and Sports Illustrated, announced that it was cutting 600 jobs and reorganizing its staff. And Gannett, the largest newspaper publisher in the country, compounded the grimness by announcing it was laying off 10 percent of its work force - as many as 3,000 people."

Amazing how Carr classifies "people who type on deadline" as an exclusive term for those in print.

I also wonder why "newspaper Web sites" are referred to as such. Why can't we call a "news site" a news site and be done with?

And here's Carr's pitifully ignorant old media apologizer comment: "The blogosphere has had its share of news breaks, but absent a functioning mainstream media to annotate, it could be pretty darn quiet out there."

Phooey. Wake up and smell the roses and hear the din Mr Carr. It's as "noisy" out here as the clatter of any newsroom. For every newspaper that dies, thousands of news sites sprout up. The ignorance on Mr Carr's part is that this won't qualify as "mainstream media". Mainstream is over-rated, just as Wall Street analysts had over Main Street bloggers about a month or two ago.

Finally, he quotes Google's Eric Schmidt: "If the great brands of journalism - the trusted news sources that readers have relied on - were to vanish, then the Web itself would quickly become a 'cesspool' of useless information."

Consider a ZaaK433 comment:

"if the great brands of journalism -- the not so trusted news sources readers don't rely on -- were to vanish, then the Web itself would quickly fill the vacuum and see the attention it deserves and become a decentralized but trusted source of information."

Enough said.

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