Amid Journalism Cutbacks, Concern about Democracy

There continues to be a lot of concern about what happens in our democracy when the number of journalists dramatically declines.
 
In a “PressThink” blog post last week, Jay Rosen pulled together several recent essays related to this topic, including Clay Shirky’s “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable,” Steven Berlin Johnson’s “Old Growth Media and the Future of News” and Dan Conover’s “2020 Vision: What’s Next for News.”
 
Those three pieces are relatively optimistic about the future of journalism. Paul Starr, in writing “Goodbye to the Age of Newspapers (Hello to a New Era of Corruption)” for The New Republic, is less optimistic.
 
I’ve noticed a backlash against such pessimism, which brings to mind a couple of observations: The same news industry now crying about the future of investigative journalism sent a total of 15,000 journalists to cover the Democratic National Convention; and local news organizations that have significantly shed their reporting staffs still have enough time to produce photo galleries of teen girls wrestling in chocolate syrup.
 
Before we prematurely signal the end of journalistic investigations, though, take a minute to look through this recent, impressive list of watchdog reporting efforts at local newspapers. It was pulled together by the Associated Press Managing Editors Association, which has begun to send out a monthly newsletter detailing some of the great work still being done around the country.