For those who have the time and patience to get through a piece of several thousand words--the first of two parts, no less--Michael Massing's essay in the current
New York Review of Books is
worth the effort. Titled "The End of News?," Massey posits in Part 1 that, everywhere one ventures to look, conventional, mainstream news is no longer in vogue, at least not as we remember it
from, oh, way back in the 1990s. Chapter by chapter, he takes us through the demise of old media, or what might be thought of as "responsible media." Particularly in the area of political and
civics reporting, Massing places blame on for-profit media outlets, charging them with abandoning their roles as impartial observers of the truth. Finally, he says, "All eyes are now on the
Internet. Even as paid circulation has dwindled at many papers, the number of visits to their Web sites has soared. Both nytimes.com and washingtonpost.com rank among the top twenty on-line
global news sites; in September, the Times site received visits from more than 21 million different users. Because these sites are mostly free, however, many readers have switched to them from
print editions." His thoughts on this follow, discursively. No hint as to where Part 2 of the erudite essay will take us. But for those who care about such matters, and who are willing to read
an old media, dead-tree piece about them, the time will probably be well spent.
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