The Tribune Company, which owns the Chicago Tribune, the L.A. Times, and other properties, has filed for bankruptcy protection. Meanwhile, the New York Times has mortgaged its building to raise much-needed cash.
Before we gloat about the end of print journalism, with its liberal bias, and hail its replacement with the internet, consider. . . . When you read news on the internet, notice that it is nearly always linked to a newspaper. What newspapers do is pay people in your town and around the world to dig up news and then write it up. The internet is free, but that means that the internet is not paying anyone to perform that service. That we can now get news free does wreck the newspapers’ business model, but until people pay for internet news–enabling a true migration from print-on-paper to online news organizations–we will not have anything to replace what newspapers, for all of their current faults, do.
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