http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthink...

This is a link to a very thought-provoking piece by Clay Shirky. Key line: "Society doesn't need newspapers. Society needs journalism." What is interesting about Shirky is how he can separate nostalgia from functionalism and agency. By that I mean, many things that we decry as "bad" in the face of "new technology" (and this is true whether we live in 1790 or 2009) are really our resistance to change. Even if one does not agree with a statement like Shirky's underscoring a distinction between newspapers and journalism, it is crucial to be able to separate out the parts of what something like "newspapers" means in a functional way, that speaks to the needs of a society, not to the habits of a society.

And once we have separated out our habits from our needs, then we have to think in material, economic terms about what a "newspaper" is, what relationships it enables (media, advertising, advice, corporate interests, censorship, democracies, etc), what it supports (investigative journalism but also cheerleading for corporate interests), and so forth. In other words, once we think about "journalism" discrete from "newspapers," then we can think more clearly about what is essential for our society, how we can support it, what systems of value are in place to judge it, and so forth. Under the Reagan Administration, for example, the near-sacred FCC rules regulating separation of media--radio v tv v journalism--and limiting the control of any one corporate entity to control all three in any one market or to own too many media interests in general, transformed journalism. Murdoch's politics permeate everything we see as "journalistic," as the recent debacle between Jon Stewart and Jim Cramer underscore.

So for the sake of argument, let's reverse the question: is there something to be gained by the end of newspapers as we know them in this historical moment? We may well know too palpably what we lose---but the same people who feel the loss can also tell you about the degraded state of journalism post-FCC changes. Is there something to be gained by a new configuration of corporate, political, and newspaper interests? Or is this truly the end of journalism forever?

Here's the url for the Stewart-Cramer smackdown: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/03/12/jim-cramer-on-daily-show-_n_174503.html.