Bryan Williams Laments Demise of Newspapers

On Morning Joe this morning Bryan Williams was lamenting the imminent demise of newspapers. Several of the big papers, including the New York Times and Chicago Tribune, and a lot of the smaller ones are on the verge of bankruptcy. He said that this will cause people to rely more on internet news and opinion sites, and he is worried that the people running the internet sites and providing the reporting won't be "classically trained" as journalists.

I wonder what he thinks the people now working for the newspapers will do after their employers close their doors. I would think they will just turn to the internet. In fact, a lot of them already have. Most all newspapers of any size already publish most or all of their content on the web. Some of them require subscriptions for access but most offer free access and rely on advertising for revenue. The New York Times switched to free access a year or two ago.

Yes, there are a lot of web sites out there putting out unreliable news and opinion (like this one?), but there are also a lot of printed "rags" out there too.

The cost of publishing and distributing print versions is huge. Without this cost some of them might survive by turning exclusively to the internet.

I wonder what Williams thinks the institutions that "classically train" jounalists and publishers will do after the newspapers go away. I would think they will start training them to operate on the internet.

Apparently he thinks we can't adapt to significant change. Perhaps he's still puzzled about how we managed to move from horse-drawn vehicles to cars and trucks.

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