Gil Thelen, long-time public journalist and retiring publisher of the Tampa Tribune, gives this advice for aspiring journalists: “The new journalist has to have some of the very same qualities of the wire service reporter of old. They need to…

The Knight-Ridder auction has put the financial and journalism quality spotlights on newspaper chains. Here is Phil Meyer in an Online News Hour discussion: “…Wall Street is trying to value newspapers according to their performance in the past.” But …

Here are my planned comments for the opening of the Wake Up Call: Can Trust and Quality Save Journalism? conference tomorrow: First, here is the key point: What better way to establish trust and quality than to make the public…

I am watching a C-Span speech by Rupert Murdoch, chairman and CEO of the News Corporation, at today’s American Society of Newspaper Editors conference. He restated the dire warning about the vanishing newspapers that you have been reading in these…

Anyone who has been reading this blog, knows that Phil Meyer, author of the Vanishing Newspaper, gave newspapers an early Wake Up Call, by talking about the death spiral. Unfortunately, now it sounds like a prophesy. However, Clyde Bentley, University…

I miss your blog Prints the Chaff. It was good stuff. A while back Orville Schell, dean of the graduate journalism school at the U of Calif., Berkeley, wrote about the end of the Roman Empire of the mass media. However, also in that article Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., chairman of the New York Times Company and fourth generation publisher of the Times, said in the belief that quality journalism pays in the long run. “The challenge is to remember that our history is to invest during tough times,” he says. “And when those times turn — and they do, inevitably — we will be well-positioned for recovery.”

That is consistent with what Meyer contends will win out in the future–quality journalism.

The more straightforward (and less politically charged) explanation is that people are losing their reading habit, and it’s killing newspapers.

It does seem odd, though, that most newspapers haven’t glommed onto blogs in any meaningful way, because bloggers tend to be two things newspapers desperately need: motivated readers and news junkies.

Newsapers could be arbiters of sanity in the blogosphere — somebody to lend a voice of reason amid all the blather — but they’ve got to do more than dip their toes in the water.

Bloggers are acting as “remora” fish to the sharks of journalism. They are taking what the MSM is putting out there and clearing out the errors and the slanting of the news as a basic part of the story. Then they are analyzing this product and putting their slant on it. The problem with the MSM is that they have been slanting the news so long and failing to report the rest of the news that there is a gaping hole in their credibility and the public seeing it.

What the MSM has to do is what Mr Meyer says by becoming niche journalism (which is what they are right now since they are ignoring major parts of the story in favor of what bleeds leads) or finally actually doing their real jobs and reporting the full story. I don’t believe the second is what they will do based on what I see of them so far. When the major news media mis-reports or makes unsupportable news stories and then keeps trying to fit them into the public ear, (Rathergate and Easongate and Jayson Blair et al) the public will increasingly turn them off. Shame but they are doing it to themselves.

And making flippant remarks about Fox which is doing a better job of reporting the whole story than the other MSM so far won’t help either. Cute remarks like “Faux news” will end up turning more people off because they won’t think it is cute and while the rest of the MSM snickers, the majority of the country will turn to Fox for the news they need to get. And the MSM will sit there sucking their thumbs wondering why the country doesn’t buy their product. Snide comments don’t sell in the long run and when the comments are made about the “red states are not voting in their own interests” or “red states are ignorant” or “red states can’t understand what is at stake like the blue states can” the red states will continue showing that they do in fact understand the issues which are that the blue state people think they are idiots and will continue voting for the team with morals and values and beliefs and faith. Besides, if the red states were so wrong, why are so many blue state commentators saying maybe Bush lucked out and got it right this time. Funny question, that one!!