As documented by Alan Mutter, the market value of the nation's big newspaper companies has slumped $3.9 billion in just the past couple of weeks and $27.7 billion since the first of the year. By Mutter's reckoning, 10 of the companies combined–including industry household names like The New York Times Co., A.H. Belo, Lee, McClatchy and GateHouse–are now worth a total, yep, all together, of $3.6 billion. Stunning.
Read the whole post here.
I don't know where the salvation of journalism lies, if anywhere, but we'll all miss this water when the well runs dry. People blithely say that they only read the paper on-line, but if the present situation continues, there will be only about three on-line papers left to read, and they won't report your local school board meetings. The idea of citizen journalism is a grotesque joke; it may look easy from the outside, but gathering information and synthesizing it into coherent form is at least a skilled trade.
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