Video download link | md5sum 4af087c0138d12aa814f31c6577076d6 What About Journalism Disappearing? Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0



Summary: On the World Wide Web^*, journalism is perishing; there are several reasons for this, but it's simply a reality we've come to accept

ON a couple of occasions so far this week we linked to an article, which was reposted later under a similar/identical headline: "What if Journalism Disappeared?"

The framing as a question with "what if" suggests that it is only hypothetical or a possibility even though it is already happening and has happened for years.

These profound changes are measurable numerically, by the way, having even been assessed in the recent past:

1. U.S. newsroom employment has fallen 26% since 2008 | Pew Research Center
2. The Decline of Journalism since 1945 | Making News: The Political Economy of Journalism in Britain and America from the Glorious Revolution to the Internet | Oxford Academic
3. How we end local news deserts - Poynter

Here in Techrights we find ourselves having to dig a lot deep and look far wider in order to post Daily Links. That's because many news sites perish, either becoming inactive or going offline completely (usually the first happens, then the latter... but nobody notices by then because all the articles/archives are "old" already). ⬆

______ ^* Many newsrooms have put all their eggs in this one basket. Yet worse, some have replaced articles with "tweets" as if the latter is a substitute and compatible with principles of journalism. As streaming and DRM are a bubble (no viable business model) and it doesn't seem like public broadcast on television has much of a future (many so-called 'cord cutters') there's a legitimate reason for concern. Is journalism in general dying?