There has been a lot of talk recently about print newspapers going away. While they will continue (for now anyway) as online publications, it has caused people to ask themselves if newspapers have reached the end of their life cycle. I think newspapers provide a critical service to all of us, and I am not so sure that other sources of media are ready to step up and fill the gap.

Reading a newspaper is an activity that engages us on several levels. While the news can be read online, it is not the same thing - any more than a Kindle is the same as a book, or online graphics have the same beauty as a photograph. When a newspaper closes, we all lose something much more important than a few minutes of enjoyment. If the newspapers go away, so do the reporters. Newspapers have an obligation to the community:
- to provide complete information
- to verify the information before reporting it
- to report impartially
- to clearly separate opinion from fact
- to report what is important, even if the rest of us were not paying attention.

There are certainly variations in how successful a given paper is at achieving these goals. Bloggers and others who provide online 'news', however, do not have the same mandate. For the most part they are free to write whatever they want, with limited or no oversight and no responsibility to get it right. Ian Jack at The Guardian puts it very well:

Online journalism is cheap to produce because it depends so much on personal assertion and on untested information taken or supplied free by individuals, institutions and organisations.

If we lose newspapers, we become far more reliant on the Official Version of events. This is critical since much of what we think, feel and believe comes from our understanding of the world around us. Now imagine that everything we know about that world is only the version the government wants us to know.

It is no less scary when considering things at the local level. When a paper closes, democracy loses. In a community with competing papers, it is easier to print news that may be less than favorable to the "movers & shakers". Once the town is down to one paper, it becomes harder to investigate those in power. Once there is no paper, there will be little if any real reporting of local news. People will become far less invested in local politics (then they are already) because they will not have local papers telling them they should care.

Martin Moore talks about this issue in a recent blog posting. In his quotes a study which in part says:

The authors concluded that the loss of the newspaper ‘made local elections less competitive along several dimensions’, notably ‘incumbent advantage, voter turnout, and the number of candidates for office’. Although this paper was focused on a single city, it also cites another study, still in manuscript, that finds, based on 7,000 US towns and cities, that if a town has its own daily or weekly paper the political incumbent has less advantage than if it doesn’t (Jessica Trounstine, Princeton, manuscript, 2009).

When a newspaper folds we all lose. So far, the other news media (internet, radio, television) is not ready to fill the gap it leaves behind.