There's been more than enough pixel inches dedicated to talking about the death of journalism. I don't believe it. Neither it seems does George Brock who, in summarising the thrust of his new book 'Out of Print: Newspapers, Journalism and the Business of News in the Digital Age', takes the unfashionable view that rather than dying a slow death journalism is being "renewed and re-engineered for new conditions" and that "the generative energy needed to adapt the ideals of journalism to radically new possibilities does exist". I've recently been doing a series of workshops with a national newspaper and have experienced just this.
The profession, says Brock, has always existed in inherently unstable conditions and so is continuously "being renegotiated, improvised and the subject of experiments." The dominance of print journalism has been in long-term decline (since as far back as the 1950s) and no-one can deny that newspaper businesses are undergoing some quite fundamental structural challenges. But in a world of abundance the need for what good journalism does has arguably never been greater, and there remains opportunity in adapting its fundamental aims. The decline of print newspapers and the decline of journalism are not the same thing. Worth reading the whole piece.
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