Stop the presses

he Seattle PI is up for sale and may shut down, the parent company of the Chicago Tribune -- which also owns the Los Angeles Times -- has filed for bankruptcy, and the Miami Herald is up for sale, along with more than 30 other large US newspapers. The 112-year-old New York Times is skating on thin ice, with no relief from the global economic meltdown, due to declining revenues and skyrocketing debt, facing the prospect of bankruptcy and possible sale (something long-time owners insist will never happen).

During the mid-eighties, for several years I studied journalism and photojournalism and worked for a community college student newspaper. I started out as a writer and photographer, then became an editor, writing on an Apple IIe computer and typesetting on an old Compugraphic machine, pasting up waxed bits of copy and halftone photographs under a light table. One summer, I worked as an intern for a weekly paper that has been continuously published since 1893. Another summer, I worked for a news magazine in Istanbul, Türkiye.

Eventually I decided to switch to creative nonfiction writing from journalism. But my decision was less prescient about the shifting fortunes of the news business than it was about realizing I didn't have the stomach for the competitive and image-conscious world of journalism.

The journalism majors and journalists I knew then talked a good talk about the fourth estate, about objectivity and advocacy, even fetishised watchdog and investigative journalism a' la Woodward and Bernstein. But secretly, many did everything they could to steal and sabotage each other's ideas and projects; more than a few were manipulative and devious. Many more wanted to be broadcast journalists, or to break into the well-compensated business of public relations.

After a few years, it was clear journalism was not a good fit for me. Nearly every assignment involved either a boring posed photograph or canned story or grappling with questions about intruding onto someone’s private pain, as yet another individual or family faced a crisis and I was poking around, preparing to bare it for the world to see.

For more than a decade now, I have worked in the much more prosaic world of technical writing. The journalist in me once read four daily print newspapers. Now, we have one paper delivered to our home. However, I feel entitled to read online versions of my favorite print newspapers whenever I feel like it. As long as they are still there.

To mix metaphors, all of the people who vote with laptop and mouse pound another nail in the coffin of print newspapers facing down an untimely demise. They are not alone, however. People who write blogs and alternate news sites lift the hammer, too.

But what happens when or if the New York Times stops the presses? If a newspaper ceases print publishing and becomes available only online, how will that affect coverage and correspondents? Will online revenue be able to sustain its depth and breadth and maintain its reputation? I like to read the real thing online for free, but rarely buy a print version of the NYT, though I once had it delivered daily. Like so many other people, I am a textbook example of why the traditional printed newspaper business model is rapidly becoming obsolete.

With traditional journalism shifting so swiftly, the greatest concern will be protecting the scope of rights granted the press even as, one by one, traditional presses continue to shut down.

So much at stake, so many unknowns, so little time.