"Laying the Newspaper Gently Down to Die"

A very good essay by Jay Rosen at the very good PressThink on the state of newspapers (at least as a print medium) and journalism. Lots of links to other interesting material. I kept thinking about libraries and possible parallels as I read...well, not possible parallels. There are clear parallels.

I liked this comment, from a journalist working at a small town newspaper because I am finding more and more that what gets printed in the newspaper delivered to my house is news I have already read in a web-based news source--except for the local news that isn't of much interest outside our community:

The discussion on whether newspapers are dead always seems to focus on the bigger papers, while smaller papers that focus on community news, community events, and community people, seem to thrive. You can't get the information anywhere else, and very few people in the global market want to read about how Billy Smith hit for the cycle in a local Little League game. And, as much as people like our local news, they also like the lists of names we run ... birth announcements, who got convicted of drunken driving, who got divorced, our sports agate, etc...

So, it seems to me that there's a niche to fill there, a product that local papers can offer that's unique from the bigger dailies.

Will we eventually go the way of the dinosaur? I'm not so closed minded to think that we won't, but I'll bet that your small, local dailies will live longer than the big ones that offer news product you can get almost anywhere.