A dear friend forwarded a link to me for Paul Levy’s Running a Hospital. It’s actually a blog I visit now and again as Paul is a serious thinker on this issues of health care.
But the link was for one particular entry calling for a blog rally in support of the continued survival of the Boston Globe, one of the great regional newspapers.
Here’s the text:
We have all read recently about the threat of possible closure faced by the Boston Globe. A number of Boston-based bloggers who care about the continued existence of the Globe have banded together in conducting a blog rally. We are simultaneously posting this paragraph to solicit your ideas of steps the Globe could take to improve its financial picture: We view the Globe as an important community resource, and we think that lots of people in the region agree and might have creative ideas that might help in this situation. So, here’s your chance. Please don’t write with nasty comments and sarcasm: Use this forum for thoughtful and interesting steps you would recommend to the management that would improve readership, enhance the Globe’s community presence, and make money. Who knows, someone here might come up with an idea that will work, or at least help. Thank you. (P.S. If you have a blog, please feel free to reprint this item and post it. Likewise, if you have a Twitter or Facebook account, please add this url as an update or to your status bar to help us reach more people.)
I suggest the comments might best go directly to Paul’s blog. But after I post this entry I will send Paul a link to this blog.
While I genuinely hope for the continued survival of the Globe, and am more than happy to be involved in my tiny way in just about any attempt to help (beyond, that is, my continued weekend subscription), I am acutely aware of how among the many seismic shifts of our times is what appears to be the decline and maybe extinction of the newspaper as we understand the concept.
Change is what happens. It doesn’t matter how much we rail, change happens. But what particularly concerns me here is that I don’t see the new medium yet that will collect, assess, and disseminate hard news. Particularly at the local level. Comment we get. No sweat there. But focused shoe leather or its moral equivalent journalism, that seems to be going away without anything taking its place.
In a democratic state that is a bad thing.
A very bad thing.
I always worry about an ill-informed electorate. The so-called “main stream” press has already been belittled by opinion shapers of both left and right, although it is the right that has honed this down to an art. And already people seem too easily confused about the difference between journalism and advertising.
And this trivialization has, I’m sure, a part in the decline and probable fall of the newspaper.
Sad stuff.
Dangerous stuff.
So, until the new medium presents itself, let’s do what we can.
Let’s save the Globe, if at all possible…
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