It's morning and you stumble through your routine: burn the toast, spill the coffee, pour OJ on your...

1. We are all journalists now - Dallas Libertarian
It's morning and you stumble through your routine: burn the toast, spill the coffee, pour OJ on your
Cheerios, sit down at the kitchen table to scan the morning newspaper.
At least that's what Dad used to do.
What you do is peel a pecan and papaya Granola bar, twist the top off a Wrath of Khan power drink,
grumble "On" to your cell phone-camera-PDA-iPod-Game Boy-browser-GPS-taser-metal detector-
Geiger counter-nose hair trimmer, then finger-tap the morning news subscription icon.
Check your stocks. Check the current weather outside your condo door. Check last night's Dallas
Stars hockey score against the Guatemala Quetzals. Hover over the overnight headlines and scan
their summaries. Smile at the animated "Beetle Bailey in the New Digital Army of One." Read your
favorite social-cultural-political pundit, the Dallas Libertarian Examiner.
Then stuff your MacGates iGrock Prosthetic Brain Appliance into your bathrobe pocket until the
vibro-alarm tells you it's time to wander into your home office and logon to your virtual job.
Everybody, except pig-headed newspaper people, knows that the daily newspaper as we know it is
dying. All prognosticators have their own scenario for the Newspaper of Tomorrow, like others of
their ilk have had for the Car of Tomorrow or the House of Tomorrow or the Glorious Socialist
People's Paradise of Tomorrow, about ninety percent of which has always proven to be utterly,
stupidly wrong (whatever happened to our robo-maids and our flying cars, George Jetson?)
Which means this writing is already rotting on the news vine even as it's being written.
Print dailies all over the country are dying. The Christian Science Monitor is a daily digital digest
with a Sunday-only paper edition. The Rocky Mountain News is news.
The New York Times is gasping for air and grasping for advertisers and readers and relevancy.

2. But newspapers are trying to evolve as other media have evolved.
Radio was supposed to be dying as television took over. But radio reinvented itself, becoming a
perpetual music box for teenagers, then creating FM and targeting niche markets like the classics
and modern jazz. Radio went from floor cabinet to tabletop to dashboard to portable transistor to
digital hang-around-your-neck to online to podcast to satellite to who knows where next.
Once upon a generation or three ago, magazines like Saturday Evening Post and Life and Collier's
were the multimedia of their day, offering monthly mashups of broad-based news and features and
photos with something for everyone.
But TV could offer all of that and more, better and faster. So magazines, rather than ending their
lives in a compost pit someplace, evolved. They nestled into niche markets. They specialized. A
magazine of glamour only. Bodybuilding only. Entertainment only. Sports only. Reviews of cell
phone-camera-PDA-iPod-Game Boy-browser-GPS-taser-metal detector-Geiger counter-nose hair
trimmers only.
So can the newspaper, once the old arrogant generation of degreed Journalism Majors dies off,
survive in a different form?
In the heyday of the dailies, when many cities had a dozen or more competing rags regurgitating
morning and afternoon and evening and Extra editions, reporters and editors were just very good
word-jockeys. There were few college boys or finishing school females on staff. If you could report,
you reported. If you could proofread you proofed. If you could edit you edited. Sheepskins didn't
matter. Ability did.
That part of the news biz is back. It's online. Degrees don't matter. Experience doesn't matter. Being
good is all that matters. Today a single blogger, a citizen journalist, an Examiner, is a combination
reporter-researcher-writer-proofer-editor-page designer-pundit-publisher. Who's the fact checker?
Everyone. Make one small error of accuracy and readers from around the world will fill your Add a
Comment box with castigating commentary of their own.
No designated gatekeeper is necessary. Everyone's the gatekeeper now. Make too many mistakes,
get too many things wrong, get boring or predictable or irrelevant and you're done. No need for a
grizzled old booze-belching Lou Grant to terminate you. Today's journalism is an instant
participatory democracy - your readers will terminate you. They'll vote with mouse pointers and
scroll wheels and touchscreen fingertip taps.
But thanks to the internet even wretched writers will always have an audience, even if it's only
themselves, their family, their friends, and a small cadre of comrades who don't know good writing
from toe fungus. The definition of a credible source, after all, is anyone who agrees with you.
Newspapers will evolve, just as radio and television and telephones and magazines have evolved.
Maybe they'll all be online. Maybe they'll all be accessed through a single permanent wireless micro
implant inside our brains, right next to our mandatory scannable Big Brother ID chips. Maybe
streaming text and video will be visible on the bio circuits imbedded in the lens implants in our eyes
whenever we click our tongues. Maybe it'll be something else.
In the end, agree or not, like it or not, we are all journalists now.
(Jeff Ignatius, Editor of the River Cities Reader, gives the lowdown on his area's local press as

3. emblematic of the national trend in his feature, RIP, the Daily Paper: As Headlines Document the
Death of Print Media, How Will Quad Cities Newspapers Survive?)
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