Anyone who has followed my posts here for any length of time knows that I’m passionate about the future of journalism, so it gives me great pleasure to announce that I’ve joined the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard as a contributing blogger. My posts will be showing up there several times a week, along with the posts of two other journalist/bloggers I’ve come to admire: Tim Windsor, a former online VP at the Baltimore Sun who also blogs at Zero Percent Idle, and former newspaper publisher Martin Langeveld, who also has a personal blog called News After Newspapers. I’d like to thank Joshua Benton, director of the Nieman Journalism Lab, for giving me this opportunity.
Here’s the top part of my introductory post:
To many people, this may seem like a terrible time to be a newspaper journalist. After all, newspapers are closing up shop, shutting down their print editions, filing for bankruptcy, and generally sliding deeper and deeper into irrelevance, aren’t they? Well, yes and no. Yes, a major newspaper — the Christian Science Monitor — recently decided to stop printing a daily edition, and yes, Tribune Co. has filed for bankruptcy, saddled by billions of dollars in debt. Other papers are struggling financially as well, including the venerable New York Times. Does all of this fill me with gloom? Not at all.
And not just because I’m Canadian (although our industry is somewhat healthier). The reality is that I see the upheaval sweeping through our industry as a fundamentally positive force in the long run, as chaotic and painful as it may seem right now. That may not come as much comfort if you are one of the thousands who are losing their jobs at papers across the country, but I believe it is true nonetheless.
(read the rest of this post at the Nieman Journalism Lab blog)
