Signs Of Print's Future II

From this old post, Luis Is Listening has sent in a fresh link: I Read The News Today...Oh Boy by Eric Alterman. It's so fresh, the article is said to have first appeared in the August 4, 2008 issue of The Nation, almost two weeks from today. An excerpt:

The more one listens to the men and women at the top of the industry, the more it becomes obvious that the survival of the newspaper--the primary information-gathering and knowledge-disseminating instrument of American democracy--is going to have to come from somewhere else. Sure, the blogosphere makes some invaluable contributions and a few foundations are rising to the challenge of funding investigative journalism. Carnegie Corporation president Vartan Gregorian recently suggested to me that universities might attach a small fee to their students' tuition--like an activities fee--to pay for the newspaper subscription of their choice. This would improve the newspapers' bottom line, give their advertisers access to a coveted demographic and, if successful, would inculcate in the students the habit of newspaper reading as they approach maturity as voting citizens. It's a great idea, and unlike most of what one hears at these conferences, it is on scale with the problem. Unfortunately, young people do not appear to want to pick up a newspaper, even for free. They often leave them lying around, even at journalism schools, where they are distributed gratis.

I don't have a better idea, except to repeat, again, the following: the loss of daily newspapers is a significant threat to the future of our democracy. It is far too important to be left in the hands of a bunch of clueless media moguls and their "chief innovation officers."