Journalism and the shifting ground under our feet

Jim Romanesko, the Poynter blogger assigned to sit in the control tower as the planes go down all over the airspace, talked today about how The Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer are in trouble: big trouble.

Romanesko's blog also points us to Roger Simon's observation in Columbia Journalism Review (from a look-back at the McCain camp's bullying of the press) that most Americans are already so mad at the press that beating up on them only increases sympathy for them. Made McCain look like a Steelers tackler kicking a poodle. (Or Kurt Warner.)

Then we have ABC News (owned by Disney, remember) denying that a talk-show format program is bumping Nightline out of its spot in the batting order.

So who cares about news anymore? The people who need it.

And they'll get it, too. Even if they have to pay more. There's a scene in "The Count of Monte Cristo" where the count, seated at breakfast with the young man he'll later learn is his son, tells the boy that he pays well to find out what's happening in every city he visits or has interests. That's fiction imitating life. It was true in Alexander Dumas' day. It was true when our nation was founded, it was true when the newspaper barons built palaces to honor themselves — places like Hearst Castle and Tribune Tower — and it's still true today.

Maybe the notion of daily news for the masses has become a questionable commodity. But we need to take a step back. It's not the news that people don't like. It's how that news comes to them. So some don't like the wood-pulp folded thing in the plastic bag in their driveway. They still want to know if it's going to rain tomorrow and what happened at the Santa Monica Airport where there was all that smoke yesterday. And they want details. Lots of details — like if anyone's hurt or dead. The amateur pilots want to know enough detail that they can stir their coffee with it at Starbucks (if the one down their street is still open. And if it's closed, they want to know why, and if the one by their brother's house is closing soon.)

I don't want to be flip about this. The shifting of land under our feet is scary. I sat through a magnitude 4.5 quake last month and I know.

But I know what a lot of journalism educators do. It's the young people. The cigar-chompers in Chicago who are covening to talk about saving that city's journalism are making a big mistake. They forgot to invite anybody under 30 to sit at the table in front of microphones.