IS JOURNALISM DEAD? OUT OF WORK CRITICS, HERE YA GO ...

Is this what it comes down to? For all of the out of work journalists....

Here ya go.

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IS JOURNALISM DEAD? ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS FOLDS

Via AP: DENVER - Questions about the future of the Rocky Mountain News had become so common, the newspaper's staff put up a handwritten paper sign on the news desk that said, "We don't know."

On Thursday, someone wrote over it in heavy black marker: "Now we know."

Colorado's oldest newspaper, which launched in Denver in 1859, printed its last edition Friday, leaving The Denver Post as the only daily newspaper in town.



Read more HERE.

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BLASHPHEMOUS? SLIM OWNS THE NY TIMES

Carlos Slim (sounds like a fake name, huh?), reputed to be the world's second-richest man, would gain the prestige of owning one of the world's best-known and most influential newspapers - The New York Times.

The Latin American billionaire looks to expand his empire in the United States in a deal that could make him the largest shareholder of The New York Times Co.
The $250 million investment by Mexican tycoon Carlos Slim could provide some synergies with his telecommunications holdings in Latin America, analysts say.

Click HERE to read more.

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NO BOOZE FOR NY TIMES SCRIBES

OK... So booze and journalism go hand-in-hand. Sort of. But, that said, times are changin' now and not surprisingly, the New York Times is following suit with every other news outfit in the country and updating its expenses guidlines. Bill Schmidt, the paper's Deputy Managing Editor, just sent out a memo to staffers with a list of new requests that require some minor adjustment, but shouldn't rattle anyone on Eighth Avenue.

Staffers are no longer allowed to expense drinks when they take one another out (they had that? what a life!), and they'll only be allowed to expense $50 on dinner and $30 on lunch—all in all, a very manageable sacrifice.

To read the entire post (and memo) click HERE.

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MORE PROOF: JOURNALISM IS GOING THE WAY OF THE DINO

Papa H. did his fair share of reporting early in his career so we think he'd be shaking his head right about now. The Rocky Mountain News is on the sale block, facing an uncertain future as Colorado's oldest newspaper approaches its 150th anniversary. The head of Cincinnati-based E.W. Scripps, the Rocky's owner, acknowledged in making the announcement Thursday that if a buyer does not step forward in the next four to six weeks that the paper could be closed - a move that could occur as soon as early 2009.

To read more, click HERE.

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IT'S OFFICIAL: MORE PROOF REAL JOURNALISM IS DEAD

This disturbing tidbit comes courtesy of The International Herald Tribune (which is the international edition of the NY Times.

LOS ANGELES - When Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt negotiated with People and other celebrity magazines this summer for photos of their newborn twins and an interview, the stars were seeking more than the estimated $14 million they received from the deal. They also wanted a hefty slice of journalistic input — a promise that the winning magazine's coverage would be positive, not merely in that instance but into the future.

According to the deal offered by Jolie, the winning magazine was obliged to offer coverage that would not reflect negatively on her or her family, according to two people with knowledge of the bidding who were granted anonymity because the talks were confidential. The deal also asked for an "editorial plan" providing a road map of the layout, these people say.

To read the whole story, click HERE.

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OBAMA AND NEWSPAPERS: MAYBE JOURNALISM ISN'T DEAD ...

So we all lived through history on Tuesday night and the momentous event gave (rightly so) goosepimples to the entire collective world. Yup, we all lived through it and wanted to document it somehow. Get a piece of it as a keepsake for our own personal time capsules.

Here's what an innovative Washington Post reporter had to say about that...

From PAUL FARHI, Washington Post:

To: You
From: Your newspaper

Dear You:

Every day, I was there for You, rain or shine, good times and bad. I was always available. Like a puppy, all I ever wanted was to please You.

Was it lively conversation You wanted? Cackling opinions? The latest news and gossip? I gave You all that. I even tried to keep up on all the sports and business stuff because I knew you cared about that, too.

Oh, we had so many beautiful years together. Sometimes I made you mad. Often, I moved you. But we always made up.

And then a few years ago you rewarded my loyalty by straying. You went elsewhere. You sought the company of others who, you thought, gave you something that I could not. Fickle and faithless, you went looking for something faster, newer and younger.

Oh, You.

I wondered, incessantly, had I failed you? Was it me?

And then one day this week, You wanted me again. Hungrily. Desperately. You searched everywhere for me. You lined up outside my door, stood in the rain and cold, on the chance that I would be available to You again.

And I wasn't there. How ironic!

Finally, You recognized something in me again. Something that had been dormant all these years. That You needed me.

That You needed to hold me again. If only for one special day.

I feel so.... used.

I should be aghast at your behavior. I should cast you aside forever and move on, somehow. But I know in my heart what I have always known:

That I need you, too. Every day. And I want you back. Desperately. Hungrily.

So won't you use me again?

Please?
--30--

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R.I.P. THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR

What everyone has been predicting about the plight of American newspapers is starting to come to fruition. The Christian Science Monitor will eventually become a weekly. The newspaper, which will cease daily publication next April and emphasize the Web, becomes the most prominent paper to scale back print.

Sad...

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IS JOURNALISM DEAD?: NEWSPAPERS CONTINUE CIRCULATION DECLINE

Here are the top 25 daily papers ranked for the six-month period ending September 2008 based on a Monday-through-Friday average, according to the new FAS-FAX from the Audit Bureau of Circulations released today. The percent change compares this period to the same period a year ago.

USA TODAY -- 2,293,310 -- 0.01%
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL -- 2,011,999 -- 0.01%
NEW YORK TIMES -- 1,000,665 -- (-3.58%)
LOS ANGELES TIMES -- 739,147 -- (-5.20%)
DAILY NEWS, NEW YORK -- 632,595 -- (-7.16%)

NEW YORK POST -- 625,421 -- (-6.25%)
THE WASHINGTON POST -- 622,714 -- (-1.94%)
CHICAGO TRIBUNE -- 516,032 -- (-7.75%)
HOUSTON CHRONICLE -- 448,271 -- (-11.66%)
NEWSDAY -- 377,517 -- (-2.58%)

THE ARIZONA REPUBLIC -- 361,333 -- (-5.51%)
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE -- 339,430 -- (-7.07%)
THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS -- 338,933 -- (-9.28%)
BOSTON GLOBE -- 323,983 -- (-10.18%)
STAR TRIBUNE, MINNEAPOLIS -- 322,360 -- (-4.26%)

STAR-LEDGER, NEWARK, N.J. -- 316,280 -- (-10.40%)
CHICAGO SUN-TIMES -- 313,176 -- (-3.94%)
PLAIN DEALER, CLEVELAND -- 305,529 -- (-8.58%)
THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER -- 300,674 -- (-11.06%)
DETROIT FREE PRESS -- 298,243 -- (-6.84%)

THE OREGONIAN -- 283,321 -- (-8.45%)
THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION -- 274,999 -- (-13.62%)
SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE -- 269,819 -- (-3.00%)
ST. PETERSBURG (FLA.) TIMES -- 268,935 -- (-6.88%)
THE SACRAMENTO BEE -- 253,249 -- (-4.22%)

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LA TIMES GAGS THEIR BLOGS

This little tidbit comes via Slate and being that Papa H. fancied himself a journalist of the highest order we have to ask ourselves, should a newspaper be doing this? I say no. While granted, the L.A. Times doesn't want to "dignify" something that's appeared in the National Enquirer, perhaps the editorial board on Monday morning should review how many big stories the so-called scandal sheet has actually broken. Many...

LAT Gags Blogs: In a move that has apparently stirred up some internal discontent, the Los Angeles Times has banned its bloggers, including political bloggers, from mentioning the Edwards/Rielle Hunter story. Even bloggers who want to mention the story in order to make a skeptical we-don't-trust-the-Enquirer point are forbidden from doing so. Kausfiles has obtained a copy of the email Times bloggers received from editor Tony Pierce. [I've excised the recipient list and omitted Pierce's email address]:

From: "Pierce, Tony"

Date: July 24, 2008 10:54:41 AM PDT

To: [XXX]

Subject: john edwards

Hey bloggers,

There has been a little buzz surrounding John Edwards and his alleged affair. Because the only source has been the National Enquirer we have decided not to cover the rumors or salacious speculations. So I am asking you all not to blog about this topic until further notified.

If you have any questions or are ever in need of story ideas that would best fit your blog, please don't hesitate to ask

Keep rockin,

Tony

That will certainly calm paranoia about the Mainstream Media (MSM) suppressing the Edwards scandal.

AGAIN, via SLATE -- P.S.: Is the Times' edict a) part of a double-standard that favors Democrats (and disfavors Republicans like Rep. Vito Fossella and John McCain)? Or does it b) simply reflect an outmoded Gatekeeper Model of journalism in which not informing readers of certain sensitive allegations is as important as informing them--as if readers are too simple-minded to weigh charges that are not proven, as if they aren't going to find out about such controversies anyway? I'd say it's a mixture of both (a) and (b). This was a sensational scandal the LAT and other MSM papers passionately did not want to uncover when Edwards was a formal candidate, and now that the Enquirer seems to have done the job for them it looks like they want everyone to shut up while they fail to uncover it again. ...

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SCARY 'TIMES' INDEED...

This comes courtesy of today's Media Ink column in the New York Post. Looks like the Gray Lady is in dire trouble -- which is the case at most daily newspapers these days. You guys are all gonna miss us when we're gone... Who do you think does the majority of reporting online? Duh! Hello ... Newspapers! What's Google News going to be worth without any of the papers the piggyback doing the work for them?

THE WORST OF TIMES: STAFF BRACES FOR LAYOFFS AFTER BUYOUTS FALL SHORT
By Keith J. Kelly

The New York Times' news room is bracing for a bloodbath in the next 10 days.

The word from inside is that approximately 50 unionized journalists have accepted the buyout proposal, and only another 20 non-union editorial employees have gotten on board.

That means the ax could fall on as many as 30 editorial people in the company's first-ever mass firing of journalists in its 156-year history.

Executive Editor William Keller had said originally that he was looking to cut 100 people from the Times staff in response to the dismal newspaper advertising environment.

But then a week ago Assistant Managing Editor William Schmidt issued a memo saying it was almost certain that the company would be forced to make involuntary cuts, and he urged more volunteers to come forward.

The plea apparently fell on deaf ears.

With just 70 people stepping forward for buyouts, it is very likely that 30 newsroom staffers will be forced out in coming days.

"We're bracing for it," said one insider with some knowledge of the developments. "There's a lot of anxiety."

With competitive threats looming from The Wall Street Journal, which like The Post is owned by News Corp., sources said the business desk and national desk will be spared and will absorb only token cuts.

The Metro desk, headed by Joe Sexton, is headed toward a major reorganization and could absorb the brunt of the involuntary axings.

But, as with all developments inside the Times, things move slow.

Tuesday was the deadline for employees choosing to accept buyout packages, which offer three weeks of severance for each year worked. Management and other non-unionized employees were to have accepted their buyout offers by Monday.

Anthony Napoli, a Newspaper Guild representative, said his office was not sure how names were turned in.

"The process is not finalized," he said. "We're waiting for the Times to tell us how many have been returned and how many have been accepted."

"We do not have any updates regarding the buyouts and do not plan to disclose the numbers," said a Times spokeswoman.

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MORE WOES FOR NEWSPAPERS

Via Editor and Publisher:

NAA Reveals Biggest Ad Revenue Plunge in More Than 50 Years

NEW YORK - The newspaper industry has experienced the worst drop in advertising revenue in more than 50 years.

According to new data released by the Newspaper Association of America, total print advertising revenue in 2007 plunged 9.4% to $42 billion compared to 2006 -- the most severe percent decline since the association started measuring advertising expenditures in 1950.

The drop-off points to an economic slowdown on top of the secular challenges faced by the industry. The second worst decline in advertising revenue occurred in 2001 when it fell 9.0%.

Total advertising revenue in 2007 -- including online revenue -- decreased 7.9% to $45.3 billion compared to the prior year.

There are signs that online revenue is beginning to slow as well. Internet ad revenue in 2007 grew 18.8% to $3.2 billion compared to 2006. In 2006, online ad revenue had soared 31.4% to $2.6 billion. In 2005, it jumped 31.4% to $2 billion.

To read the rest of the story, click HERE.

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LA TIMES GETS ONLINE ED AS CHIEF

Hmmm ... Is this a sign of things to come?

L.A. Times Editor Post Goes to Web Site Chief

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 15, 2008

The Los Angeles Times named its fourth editor in three years yesterday, asking Russ Stanton, who holds the title of innovation editor, to lead a staff rocked by budget cutbacks and management shake-ups.

The appointment of Stanton, who beat out another in-house candidate, comes less than a month after the paper dismissed Jim O'Shea from the post in a battle over budget reductions. O'Shea replaced Dean Baquet, who was fired during a similar fight 16 months ago.

Stanton, 49, will have to make do with less. Sam Zell, the Chicago real estate mogul who recently took control of the parent Tribune Co., announced Wednesday that he would cut 400 to 500 jobs throughout the media company. Times Publisher David Hiller said that would mean eliminating 100 to 150 jobs at his paper -- by layoffs if necessary -- including 40 to 50 in the newsroom.

To read the rest of the story, click HERE.

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DIRE 'TIMES' INDEED ...

Another hit for print journalism ...

The Times to Cut 100 News Jobs
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

After years of resisting the newsroom cuts that have hit most of the industry, The New York Times will bow to growing financial strain and eliminate about 100 newsroom jobs this year, the executive editor said Thursday.

The cuts will be achieved “by not filling jobs that go vacant, by offering buyouts, and if necessary by layoffs,” the executive editor, Bill Keller, said. The more people who accept buyouts, he said, “the smaller the prospect of layoffs, but we should brace ourselves for the likelihood that there will be some layoffs.”

He said, “We intend to move quickly, to get any cuts past us so that we do not spend a year bleeding slowly.”

The Times has 1,332 newsroom employees, the largest number in its history; no other American newspaper has more than about 900. There were scattered buyouts and job eliminations in the newsroom in recent years, but the overall number continued to rise, largely from the growth of its Internet operations.

To read the rest of the story, click HERE

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SCANDAL SHEETS IN TROUBLE?

I'll say it. I feel for Britney Spears. If there is one celeb that's been driven to the state of madness by the paparzzi, it has to be her. Granted, she may feed into the frenzy most of the time with dopey young adult behavior and ridiculous antics. That said, however, there's definitely a codependent thing going on - and the pappers know it and feed into it. As a result, an already-fragile pop star is in a dire state.

So, this interistingly comes via the NY POST. Perhaps, enough now, is enough ...

THE FBI is poking around the celebrity magazine world on the West Coast, investigating allegations of kickbacks and pay-for-play schemes, according to a source who was contacted by investigators.

The source was told that the probe, which appears to be at a preliminary stage, involved "paparazzi and In Touch" magazine.

The source was contacted by an agent named Dennis Webster in the FBI's Los Angeles office. Webster had not returned calls to Media Ink by presstime.

Specifics about what the feds are looking into remain murky, but people at the celebrity magazines have been burning up the lines in recent days since a story about the FBI probe was posted Wednesday on the complex.com Web site and picked up by gawker.com and jossip.com.

However, the source said that West Coast legal circles have been buzzing that Hollywood stars who have long felt they were being harassed by the paparazzi were perhaps pushing the feds to act.

To read the rest of the piece, click HERE.

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LA TIMES EDITOR AXED

All too commonplace these days are newsrooms coming under the gun when it comes to finances. What with online news venues, classified ad portals like craigslist and job sites like Monster, it's never been harder for a newspaper to be in business. This is a sad sign of the times ...

L.A Times Fires Editor in Dispute Over Budget Cuts, Month After Newspaper Parent Company Sold
By John Rogers, Associated Press Writer

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- The Los Angeles Times fired its top editor after he rejected a management order to cut $4 million from the newsroom budget, 14 months after his predecessor was also ousted in a budget dispute, the newspaper said Sunday.

James O'Shea was fired following a confrontation with Publisher David D. Hiller, the Times reported on its Web site. The story didn't say when the confrontation took place.

Times spokeswoman Nancy Sullivan said the newspaper would have no comment.

To read the rest of the story, click HERE.

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IS THE FOURTH ESTATE THAT GENERIC?

State of New Hampshire stops issuing ID cards to journalists

The Associated Press is reporting that the state employee who handled that chore says just about anyone can call himself a journalist these days, and he doesn't want to be put in the position of having to decide who's a legitimate member of the news media.

Click HERE for the whole story.

On a similar note ... "In my day, as a newspaper man, radio man and television man, I had the feeling I was telling people something they wouldn't otherwise know," says 91-year-old Daniel Schorr to the Sacramento Bee. "That's no longer true. I'm glad I'm not 20 years younger, because I'd be very discouraged. ...At my age, I look at [the media landscape] and say, 'Boy, I'm glad that's for other people.' I couldn't stand what's going on today."

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NEWS BIZ IN TROUBLE

First off, I'd like to apologise for the lack of posts lately. Awful of me ... To repent, I'd like to share this awesome piece I found online via an Australian news outlet called The Age. It delves into the future of newspapers and what the profession means to us all in this day and age. Enjoy ...
Black and white and all over?
Rachel Buchanan
August 25, 2007

INK, ribbons, hot metal, blue pencils, spikes, stones, presses, plates, blue collars, scalpels, rulers, picture wheels, wire photos, carbon copies, cigarettes, tubs of photographic chemicals: newspaper offices used to be places where you would always get your hands dirty. Only snobs or big heads called themselves journalists. The rest of us were reporters.

Jim Usher was a cadet reporter in the 1950s. He asked his boss what the difference was between a reporter and a journalist. "He said a journalist had two suits, a reporter only one," Usher wrote in The Argus: Life & Death Of A Newspaper (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2007), a collection of stories about The Argus, a Melbourne morning newspaper published from 1846 until 1957.

Thirty years later, when I was a junior reporter in New Zealand, I remember being told that one too. I never owned a suit, but I still considered myself a reporter by trade. I was one of the many hundreds of tradesmen and women who used to work with words. We sourced the best words we could from the best people, then we chipped and hacked and polished away at all that raw material to shape our little stories.

We were not alone in our work. Newspapers were also made by copytakers, proofreaders, copygirls and boys, compositors, press artists, printers, photographers, darkroom technicians. Words were worked over by many types of subeditor: down-table subs; top-table subs; wire subs; check subs; stone subs; sports subs; racing subs; business subs; foreign subs; features subs; supplement subs; layout subs; rewrite subs; chief subs; and copy tasters. A wordsmith is "a skilled user and maker of words". Sub-editors are wordsmiths, people who can make a reporter's words into something sharper, better and funnier.

Most reporters were trained on the job. I started making my living as a reporter when I was 18, sports stringing (typing copy up on my white Olivetti portable) while I did a diploma of journalism. The next year I got a job on The Southland Times, an old-fashioned paper of record. If it happened in Southland one day, it was in the paper the next. I know. I recorded golf results, shipping movements and the names, ages and places of every competitor in the province's weekly Little Athletics competition.

But the closed universe of the newspaper office, those trade-based temples to type where printers and proofreaders and journos could all sit down in a staff canteen and eat the same awful food together, is vanishing. Did we journalists miss this story because it is our own?

It is strange for me to be not quite 40 and already have memories and language that apply to working worlds that no longer exist (the afternoon newspaper being one example, seeing unsuccessful stories I'd written being thrust onto a metal spike is another.) Older journalists, such as the men and women who share their stories in the book about The Argus or who talk with Michael Young in Death, Sex & Money: Life Inside a Newspaper (Melbourne University Press, 2007), must feel this disjuncture even more acutely.

I could go on about the old days, but I won't. They're over. The question now is: what is the future for newspaper journalists and newspaper journalism?
Two contradictory forces are at work. First, there is the move towards professionalism, most notably the explosion of journalism degrees in universities. I have benefited from this change because I now have a job teaching journalism in one of these degree programs. Educators aside though, the exponential growth in journalism degrees bears little relationship to job opportunity. Between 1987 and 1992, for example, 16 metropolitan newspapers closed in Australia. A weird counter to this, though, is what I see as anti-professionalism, most notably the rise in so-called citizen or participatory journalism made possible by the net.

While printed newspapers continue to close (The Evening Post, Wellington's wonderful afternoon paper, shut in 2002) and print circulations fall or plateau, the online versions of so-called "legacy media" such as this newspaper, are flourishing.
If the nascent but powerful online news industry is any indication, journalism jobs will be scarcer than ever. Printed newspapers required massive investment in staff and presses but online news sites shift many of these costs to the consumer. Readers have to have their own computers and high-speed broadband access to get their news. Many homes and people still do not have this equipment. A $1.40 newspaper is more democratic and affordable.

One version of journalism's future was uploaded in March when Fairfax Digital launched The Brisbane Times, Australia's first metropolitan online-only newspaper. The "meet the staff" section of the website shows 14 mostly very youthful smiling faces. Surely there were more people than that employed. I rang and discovered that the Times is put out by 12 local editorial staff. Half are reporters and half are producers who copy taste, select stories, do layout, write headlines and edit. Granted they are 12 new journalism jobs but still, the News Limited hard-copy competition, The Courier-Mail, has 215 editorial staff, including about 20 dedicated online journos.

The hard-copy newspaper jobs that remain are vulnerable to the same economic forces that mean you may speak to someone in Mumbai about your phone problems in Melbourne. Also in March, Irish newspaper magnate Tony O'Reilly's company APN New Zealand announced a plan to "source some editorial production services from a specialist supplier". Translated, this means that "some sections" of The New Zealand Herald (New Zealand's biggest metropolitan daily), The Listener (a long-running weekly news magazine) and provincial newspapers including The Northern Advocate, Bay of Plenty Times and Rotorua's Daily Post will be subbed and laid out by people in Auckland employed not by APN but Pagemasters NZ, a subsidiary of the Australian news agency AAP.

The first "Pagemaster" pages appeared recently in The Herald. "The proposal reflects global trends in newspaper publishing," said APN executive Martin Simons.
A spokesman told me Pagemaster staff would produce world news pages, but I wonder how long it will be before the editing and layout of national and regional news migrates to Auckland too? Or maybe it could all be subedited in APN's Sydney head offices?

One of the most successful publishing ventures of our time is Wikipedia, the online citizen-created and edited encyclopaedia. Many Wikipedia entries are excellent but many others are inaccurate, stupid or vandalised beyond repair. In the wiki world everyone is an expert whether they are trained or not. The unifying factor is that no one is paid a cent. Wikipedia didn't need to outsource subediting because it was never part of the interactive, social-networking web 2.0 universe in the first place. It will be interesting to see if The Citizendium, a new citizen-created encyclopaedia, will overtake Wikipedia. Anonymous entries are forbidden and work will be "gently edited".

COMPUTERS entered antipodean newsrooms from the late 1980s onwards. I remember these gigantic clunky grey boxes with black screens and fuzzy green fonts, as babyish to look at as a Pac-Man console. Within a decade, computers had destroyed many of the trades associated with newspapers, but the impact of electronic pagination is nothing compared with the impact of the internet and associated mobile technologies, most especially camera-enabled mobile phones, on the way news is gathered, written, read, published and understood.

It has all happened so fast. In the 20th century, media evolved through a series of technological landmarks that seem stately in comparison: first radio waves across the Atlantic in 1901; television invented, 1926; television transmission begins in Australia, 1956; CNN begins, 1980. From there, change is compressed. In 1992 the Mosaic browser made the internet easier to use. By 1998, Matt Drudge's online news and gossip website, the Drudge Report, had broken the story of Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky, an event that is widely cited by journalism academics as the birth of online news. Google, MySpace, YouTube, wikis and blogs all belong to this century.

Stuart Allan, author of Online News (2006), begins his history of the form with the Drudge Report. Other key events are the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York, in which "amateur news reporters" used weblogs to create their own "decentralised media" and the war in Iraq, which resulted in the rise of first-person, raw accounts of life inside Iraq in the warblogs of Salam Pax and Riverbend. Participatory or citizen journalism began, in this account, with the launch of Indymedia (motto "be the media") in 2000 in Seattle during anti-globalisation protests. South Korea's OhmyNews, in which citizens write the stories (and readers tip writers they like best) and citizen "reporting" on the London bombings, Hurricane Katrina and the Asian tsunami are other examples of what Allan says are "the ways in which the very users of online news are rewriting the rules which have traditionally governed journalism as a profession".

Ordinary people, Allan argues, are now pursuing their own news agendas, sidestepping "corresponding notions of 'authority', 'credibility' and 'prestige'."
News is becoming more and more personalised. The "I" rules. Even though there are unlimited column centimetres in cyberspace, online news stories are shorter and pacier than their print counterparts. Many are in point form, like a PowerPoint presentation. Online news is shaped by the conventions of the blog, a form of writing "dominated by the use of the first person", according to Mark Tremayne, editor of the excellent collection of essays Blogging, Citizenship and the Future of Media (2007).

Tremayne points out that while researchers have been reluctant to define blogs as journalism, readers thought otherwise. Blogs were journalism and their seemingly personal, raw, unedited and informal tone meant readers trusted these "stories" more than reports in the traditional media.

Like many other journalists, I would define news as all the important, surprising, tragic or weird events that have happened here and overseas on a particular day. News is not just things that matter to me. News is information gathered, written, photographed and edited by professional journalists who strive for what I see as the impossible, but still honorable, goal of objectivity and who are motivated by the old-fashioned concept of "public interest".

In Imagined Communities (1983) theorist Benedict Anderson described newspapers as one-day bestsellers. The ritual of reading a newspaper, Anderson argued, was a private event that was also "an extraordinary mass ceremony" that helped an individual imagine themselves as part of a national community.

This analysis no longer works. A community now can be a world made for one. In the 2005 Alfred Deakin innovation lectures in Melbourne, former World Economic Forum program director Lance Knobel talked about an American media project called Daily Me. "The Daily Me is a personalised newspaper that contains just what you want," he said in a speech reprinted in Barons to Bloggers: confronting media power (Miegunyah Press, 2006).

Many people already create their own "daily me" through technologies such as bloglines or RSS (really simple syndication) that feed stories from selected sites into a subscriber's computer. The ABC is now promoting a customised news service called News You Choose. Social-networking sites such as MySpace or Facebook allow users, such as my journalism students, to both consume and create highly personalised news — coming parties, gigs, album releases, art shows, entertainment gossip — whenever they want. YouTube, the video-sharing website whose motto is "broadcast yourself" lets users post and view videos, thereby broadcasting their own unedited version of the news.

In May, when a student was stabbed at work here at La Trobe University's Bundoora campus, footage was posted on YouTube. A far more distressing emerging trend is for members of the public to use their phones to make news by filming themselves or their friends committing violent crimes, as demonstrated by recent stories on bullying.

The public is shaping news agendas as never before. Online editors can quickly see which stories "click" with readers. News risks becoming a "hit" parade, a top 10 list of most clicked items. How long before Australia gets its own version of Las Ultimas Noticias, Chile's most widely read newspaper? The paper, according to Knobel, has "a system where all clicks onto its website are recorded and displayed in the newsroom. The clicks — and the popular vote they represent — determine the print content of the newspaper. If a story gets many clicks, it will be followed up and similar stories will be written. If a story doesn't get enough clicks, it and its follow-ups are spiked".

Stories about climate change are a "hit" with readers now, but they weren't 10 years ago. News is not just what matters to me or you in this instant. As Tremayne writes: "Unless bloggers begin covering school board and city council meetings, major and not so major crimes, serious and not so serious accidents and fires, weather, issues of importance to the few and to the many and issues of little interest to themselves — all this on a daily basis — they will not provide the services now covered by the mainstream press."

News is not black and white and "read all over" any more, but I still believe in newspapers and in newspaper journalism. These pages you are holding contain more than news and features. They are an inky artefact, a monument to the efforts of a trade, a profession, a type, whose time, I fear, is passing.
Rachel Buchanan lectures in media studies at La Trobe University.

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